Sister

There was something brittle behind your humor. You had seen the hidden jibe: my lack of faith in your future as an artist.

Well, it’s more than a day or evening job for me; it’s the only job I have. After three weeks of compassionate leave, my boss’s sympathy ran out. I had to tell him “one way or the other, Beatrice,” what I was going to do, so by staying in London I resigned. That makes it sound as if I’m an easygoing person who can respond to situations in a flexible way, trading in senior manager of a corporate identity design company for part-time barmaid with barely a break in my stride. But you know that I am nothing like that. And my New York job with its regular salary and pension scheme and orderly hours was my last foothold on a life that was predictable and safe. Surprisingly, I enjoy working at the Coyote.

The walking helps and after forty minutes my breathing slows; my heartbeat returns to a recognizable rhythm. I finally take notice of your telling me I should at least have phoned Dad. But I thought his new bride would comfort him far better than me. Yes, they’d been married eight years, but I still thought of her as a new bride—fresh and white and sparkling with her youth and fake diamond tiara, untainted by loss. Little wonder Dad chose her over us.

I reach the Coyote and see Bettina has put up the green awning and is arranging the old wooden tables outside. She welcomes me by opening her arms, a hug waiting for me to walk into. A few months ago, I would have been repelled. Fortunately, I have become a little less touchy. We hug tightly and I am grateful for her physicality. I finally stop shivering.

She looks at me with concern. “Are you feeling up to working?”

“I’m fine, really.”

“We watched it on the news. They said the trial would be in the summer?”

“Yes.”

“When do you reckon I’ll get my computer back?” she asks, smiling. “My writing’s illegible; no one can read their menus.” The police took her computer, knowing that you often used it, to see if there was anything on it that could help with their investigation. She does have a truly beautiful smile and it always overwhelms me. She puts her arm around me to escort me inside, and I realize she was deliberately waiting for me.

I do my shift, still feeling nauseated and headachy, but if anyone notices my quietness, no one comments. I was always good at mental math so that side of barmaiding comes easily, but the banter with the customers does not. Fortunately, Bettina can talk for two and I rely on her this evening, as I often used to on you. The customers are all regulars and have the same courtesy toward me as the staff, not asking me questions or commenting on what is happening. Tact is catching.

By the time I get home, it’s late and, physically wrung out by the day, I long to sleep. Fortunately, only three stalwart reporters remain. Maybe they’re freelancers in need of cash. No longer part of a pack, they don’t shout out questions or force lenses in my face. Instead, it’s more of a cocktail-party scenario, where they are at least conscious that I may not want to talk to them.

“Miss Hemming?”

Yesterday it was “Beatrice,” and I resented the false intimacy. (Or “Arabella” from those who’d been too sloppy to do their homework.) The woman reporter continues, at a polite distance. “Can I ask you some questions?” It’s the reporter I heard outside the kitchen window on Sunday evening talking on her mobile.

“Wouldn’t you rather be at home reading bedtime stories?”

She is visibly startled.

“I was eavesdropping.”

“My son’s with his aunt tonight. And, unfortunately, I don’t get paid for reading bedtime stories. Is there anything you’d like people to know about your sister?”

“She’d bought her baby finger paints.”

I’m not sure what made me say that. Maybe because for the first time you weren’t just living in the present, but planning for the future. Understandably, the reporter wants something else. She waits.

I try to summarize you into a sentence. I think of your qualities, but in my head it starts turning into a personal ad: “Beautiful, talented, 21-year-old, popular and fun loving, seeks …” I hear you laugh. I left out good sense of humor but in your case that’s entirely true. I think of why people love you. But as I list those reasons, I wobble perilously close to an obituary, and you’re too young for that. An older male reporter, silent until now, barges in. “Is it true she was expelled from school?”

“Yes. She hated rules, especially ridiculous ones.”

He scribbles and I continue my quest for an encapsulating sentence about you. How many subclauses can a single sentence hold?

“Miss Hemming?”

I meet her eye. “She should be here. Now. Alive.”

My six-word summary of you.

I go inside the flat, close the door, and hear you telling me that I was too harsh on Dad earlier. You’re right, but I was still so angry with him then. You were too young to take in what Mum and Leo went through when he left, just three months before Leo died. I knew, rationally, that it was the cystic fibrosis that made him leave, made Leo so ill that he couldn’t bear to look at him, made Mum so tense that her heart knotted into a tight little ball that could barely pump the blood around her body let alone beat for anyone else. So I knew that rationally Dad had his reasons. But he had children and so I thought there were no reasons. (Yes, had, because two of his children were dead and the third was no longer a child.)

You believed him when he said he’d be back. I was five years older but no wiser, and for years I had a fantasy of a happy-ever-after ending. The first night I spent at university my fantasy ended, because I thought a happy- ever-after was pointless. Because with my father I didn’t want to hope for a happy ending but to have had a happy beginning. I wanted to have been looked after by Daddy in childhood, not finding resolution with my father as an adult. But I’m not so sure of that now.

Outside your window I see the reporters have all gone. Pudding bends her purring body around my ankles,