Sister

blackmailing me into giving her more food. When I’ve fed her, I fill a watering can and go out the kitchen door.

“This is your backyard?” I asked on my first visit to your flat, astonished that you hadn’t meant “backyard” in the American sense of a garden, but in the literal one of a few feet of rubble-strewn earth and a couple of wheelie bins. You smiled. “It’ll be beautiful, Bee, just wait.”

You must have worked like a Trojan. All the stones cleared, the earth dug through and planted. You’ve always been passionate about gardening, haven’t you? I remember when you were tiny you’d trail Mum around the garden with your child-sized, brightly painted trowel and your special gardening apron. But I never liked it. It wasn’t the long wait between seed and resulting plant that I minded about (you did, hotly impatient), it was that when a plant finally flowered, it was over too quickly. Plants were too ephemeral and transient. I preferred collecting china ornaments, solid and dependable inanimate objects that wouldn’t change or die the following day.

But since staying in your flat, I have really tried, I promise, to look after this little patch of garden outside the back door. (Fortunately, Amias is in charge of your flowerpot garden of Babylon down the steps to your flat at the front.) I’ve watered the plants out here every day, even adding flower food. No, I’m not absolutely sure why— maybe because I think it matters to you, maybe because I want to nurture your garden because I didn’t nurture you? Well, whatever the motivation, I’m afraid I have failed abysmally. All the plants out here are dead. Their stalks are brown and the few remaining leaves desiccated and crumbling. Nothing is growing out of the bare patches of earth. I empty the last drops from the watering can. Why do I carry on this pointless task of watering dead plants and bare earth?

“It’ll be beautiful, Bee, just wait.”

I’ll refill the watering can and wait a while longer.

5

wednesday

I arrive at the Crown Prosecution Service offices and notice Miss Crush Secretary staring at me. Actually, scrutinizing seems more accurate. I sense that she is assessing me as a rival. Mr. Wright hurries in, briefcase in one hand, newspaper in the other. He smiles at me openly and warmly; he hasn’t yet made the switch from home life to office. Now I know that Miss Crush Secretary is definitely assessing me as a rival because when Mr. Wright smiles at me, her look becomes openly hostile. Mr. Wright is oblivious. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Come through.” Mentally he’s still knotting his tie. I follow him into his office and he closes the door. I feel his secretary’s eyes on the other side, still watching him.

“Were you all right last night?” he asks. “I know this must be harrowing.”

Before you died, the adjectives about my life were second league: stressful, upsetting, distressing; at the worst, deeply sad. Now I have the big-gun words— harrowing, traumatic, devastating—as part of my thesaurus of self.

“We’d got to your finding someone in Tess’s bedroom?”

“Yes.”

His mental tie is knotted now, and we resume business. He reads me back my own words, “ ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ ”

The man turned. Despite the freezing flat, his forehead had a film of sweat. There was a moment before he spoke. His Italian accent was, intentionally or not, flirtatious. “My name is Emilio Codi. I’m sorry if I startled you.” But I’d known immediately who he was. Did I sense threat because of the circumstances— because I suspected him of killing you—or would I have found him threatening even if that wasn’t the case? Because unlike you, I find Latinate sexuality—that brash masculinity of hard jawline and swarthy physique— menacing rather than attractive.

“Do you know that she’s dead?” I asked, and the words sounded ridiculous—an over-the-top stagy piece of dialogue that I didn’t know how to deliver. Then I remembered your colorless face.

“Yes. I saw it on the local news. A terrible, terrible tragedy.” His default voice mode was charm, however inappropriate, and I thought that to charm can also mean to entrap. “I just came to get my things. I know it seems like indecent haste—”

I interrupted him, “Do you know who I am?”

“A friend, I presume.”

“Her sister.”

“I’m sorry. I’m intruding.”

He couldn’t hide the adrenaline in his voice. He started to walk toward the door, but I blocked his path.

“Did you kill her?”

I know, pretty blunt, but then this wasn’t a carefully crafted Agatha Christie moment.

“You’re obviously very upset—” he replied, but I cut him off.

“You tried to make her have an abortion. Did you want her out of the way too?”

He put down what he was carrying and I saw that they were canvases. “You’re not being rational, and that’s understandable, but—”

“Get out! Get the fuck out!”

I yelled my ugly grief at him, yelling over and over, still yelling when he’d gone. Amias came hurrying in through the open front door, bleary from sleep. “I heard shouting.” In the silence he looked at my face. He knew without my saying anything. His body caved and then he turned away, not wanting me to witness his grief.

The phone rang and I let the answering machine get it. “Hi, it’s Tess.”

For a moment the rules of reality had been broken, you were alive. I grabbed the receiver.

“Darling? Are you there?” asked Todd. What I had heard earlier was, of course, just your answering machine