Sister

I was grateful to him.

I sat under a copse of black-limbed trees, leafless and lifeless in the silencing snow.

At what point did I know you were dead? Was it when DS Finborough told me? When I saw PC Vernon’s pale tearful face? When I saw your toiletries still in your bathroom? Or when Mum phoned to say you’d gone missing? When did I know?

I saw a stretcher being taken out of the derelict toilet building. On the stretcher was a body bag. I went toward it. A strand of your hair had caught in the zipper. And then I knew.

4

Why am I writing this to you? I deflected that question last time, talked about my need to make sense of it all, my dots of detail revealing a pointillistic painting. I ducked the real part of the question: why to you? Is this a make-believe game of the almost insane? Sheets and blankets make a tent, a pirate ship or a castle. You are the fearless knight, Leo is the swashbuckling prince, and I am the princess and narrator, telling the story as I want it. I was always the storyteller, wasn’t I? Do I think you can hear me? Absolutely yes/Definitely not. Take your pick; I do hourly.

Put simply, I need to talk to you. Mum told me I didn’t say very much till you were born, then I had a sister to talk to and I didn’t stop. I don’t want to stop now. If I did, I’d lose a part of me. It’s a part of me I’d miss. I know you can’t criticize or comment on my letter to you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know your criticisms or guess at your comments, just as you used to know and guess at mine. It’s a one-way conversation, but one that I could have only with you.

And it’s to tell you why you were murdered. I could start at the end, give you the answer, the final page, but you’d ask a question that would lead back a few pages, then another, all the way to where we are now. So I’ll tell you one step at a time, as I found out myself, with no reflecting hindsight.

“A policeman I hadn’t met before asked me to identify her.”

I have told Mr. Wright what I have told you, minus deals with the devil and the other nonessential detours from my statement.

“What time was this?” he asks, and his voice is kind, as it has been throughout this interview, but I can’t answer him. The day you were found, time went demented; a minute lasted half a day, an hour went past in seconds. Like a children’s storybook, I flew in and out of weeks and through the years—second star to the right and straight on to a morning that would never arrive. I was in a Dali painting of drooping clocks, a Mad Hatter’s tea- party time. No wonder Auden said, “Stop all the clocks”; it was a desperate grab for sanity.

“I don’t know what time it was,” I reply. I decide to change a little of my truth. “Time didn’t mean anything to me anymore. Usually time alters and affects everything, but when someone you love dies, time cannot change that—no amount of time will ever change that—so time stops having any meaning.”

When I saw your strand of hair, I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing. A little too much for Mr. Wright, I agree, but I want him to know more about the reality of your death. It can’t be contained in hours or days or minutes. Remember those 1930s coffee spoons, each one like a melted sweet? That’s how I’d been living my life, in tiny measured doses. But your death was a vast sea, and I was sinking. Did you know that an ocean can be seven miles deep? No sun can penetrate that far down. In the total darkness, only misshapen, unrecognizable creatures survive, mutant emotions that I never knew existed until you died.

“Shall we break there?” Mr. Wright asks, and for a moment I wonder if I’ve voiced my thoughts out loud and he’s worried I’m a crazy woman. I’m pretty sure that I managed to keep my thoughts under wraps and he’s being considerate. But I don’t want to have to revisit this day again. “I’d rather finish.” He stiffens, almost imperceptibly, and I sense he is bracing himself. I hadn’t considered this would be difficult for him. It was hard for the Ancient Mariner to tell his tale, but hard too for the poor wedding guest forced to listen. He nods and I continue.

“The police had brought Mum to London but she couldn’t face identifying Tess, so I went to the police morgue on my own. A police sergeant was with me. He was in his late fifties. I can’t remember his name. He was very kind to me.”

As we went into the morgue the police sergeant held my hand and he kept holding it. We went past a room where they do postmortems. The shiny metal surfaces, white tiles and sharp lighting made it look like a high-tech designer kitchen taken to an extreme. He led me to a room where you were. The smell of antiseptic was overwhelming. The sergeant asked me if I was ready. I never would be. I nodded. He pulled back the blanket.

You were wearing your thick winter coat, my Christmas present to you. I’d wanted to make sure you were warm. I was stupidly glad that you were wearing it. There is no description of the color of death, no Pantone number to match your face. It was the opposite of color, the opposite of life. I touched your still satin-shiny hair. “She was so beautiful.”

The sergeant tightened his fingers around mine. “Yes. She is beautiful.”

He used the present tense and I thought he hadn’t heard me properly. But I think now that he was trying to make it a little better; death hadn’t robbed you of everything yet. He was right; you were beautiful in the way that Shakespeare’s tragic heroines are beautiful. You’d become a Desdemona, an Ophelia, a Cordelia—pale and stiff with death, a wronged heroine, a passive victim. But you were never tragic or passive or a victim. You were joyful, passionate and independent.

I saw that the thick sleeves of your coat were soaked through with blood, now dried, making the wool stiff. There were cuts to the insides of your arms, where your life had bled from you.

I don’t remember what he said or if I replied. I can only remember his hand holding mine.

As we left the building, the sergeant suggested they ask the French police to tell Dad, and I thanked him.

Mum was waiting for me outside. “I’m sorry. I just couldn’t bear to see her like that.” I wondered if she thought I could bear it. “You shouldn’t have to do that sort of thing,” she continued. “They should use DNA or something. It’s barbaric.” I didn’t agree. However appalling, I had needed to see the brutal reality of your no-color face to believe you were dead.