Sister

I’d always thought that whatever worst-case scenario happened in my life, I’d have Todd to cling to. But now I realized why no one could be my safety rope. I’d been falling since you were found—plummeting—too fast and too far for anyone to break my fall. And what I needed was someone who would risk joining me now seven miles down in the dark.

Mr. Wright must see my puffy face as I walk in. “Are you all right to carry on?”

“Absolutely fine.” My voice sounds brisk. He senses that this is the style that I want and continues, “Did you ask DS Finborough for a copy of the postmortem?”

“Not then, no. I accepted DS Finborough’s word that nothing else had been found in the postmortem apart from the cuts to her arms.”

“And then you went to the park?”

“Yes. On my own.”

I’m not sure why I added that. My feeling of being let down by Todd must still survive, even now, in all its irrelevancy.

I glance at the clock, almost one.

“Would it be okay if we break for lunch?” I ask. I’m meeting Mum at ten past in a restaurant round the corner.

“Of course.”

I said I’d tell you the story as I found out myself—no jumping forward—but it’s not fair on you or Mum to keep back what she feels now. And as I set the rules, I’m allowed to curve them a little now and then.

I arrive at the restaurant a few minutes early and through a window see Mum already sitting at a table. She no longer has her “hair done” and without the scaffolding of a perm it hangs straight and limp around her face.

When she sees me, her taut face relaxes. She hugs me in the middle of the restaurant, only mildly concerned that she is holding up a waiter en route to the kitchen. She strokes my hair (now longer) away from my face. I know, not Mum at all. But grief has pressed out of her all that we thought of as Mumish, leaving exposed someone who felt deeply familiar, connected to the rustle of a dressing gown in the dark and a feeling of warm arms before I could talk.

I order a half bottle of Rioja and Mum looks at me with concern. “Are you sure you should be drinking?”

“It’s only half a bottle, Mum. Between two of us.”

“But even a little alcohol can be a depressive. I read about it somewhere.”

There’s a moment of silence and then we both laugh, almost a real laugh, because being depressed would be so welcome compared with the pain of bereavement.

“It must be hard going through everything, having to remember it all,” she says.

“It’s not so bad, actually. The CPS solicitor, Mr. Wright, is very kind.”

“Where have you got to?”

“The park. Just after the postmortem result.”

She moves her hand to cover mine, so that we hold hands as lovers do, openly on the tablecloth. “I should have stopped you from going. It was freezing.” Her warm hand over mine makes tears start behind my eyes. Fortunately, Mum and I travel everywhere now with at least two packets of tissues in pockets and handbags, and little plastic bags to put the sodden ones into. I also carry Vaseline and lip salve and the futile-hopeful Rescue Remedy for when tears overwhelm me somewhere inappropriate like the motorway or the supermarket. There’s a whole range of handbag accessories that go with grief.

“Todd should have gone with you,” she says, and her criticism of Todd is somehow an affirmation of me.

I wipe my nose with a handkerchief she gave me last week, a little-girl cotton one with embroidered flowers. She says that cotton stings less than a tissue; besides, it’s a little more eco and I know you’d appreciate that.

She squeezes my hand. “You deserve to be loved. Properly loved.”

From anyone other than Mum it would be a cliche, but as Mum has never said any of this stuff before it feels newly minted.

“You too,” I reply.

“I’m not all that sure that I’m worth having.”

You must find this conversation strange in its directness. I have got used to it but you won’t have yet. There were always specters at our family feasts, taboo subjects that no one dared acknowledge, that our conversations tiptoed around, going into cul-de-sacs of not talking to one another at all. Well, now we strip these unwanted guests bare, Mum and I: Betrayal, Loneliness, Loss, Rage. We talk them into invisibility so that they’re no longer sitting between us.

There’s a question I’ve never asked her, partly because I’m pretty sure I know the answer and because— deliberately, I think—we’d never created the opportunity.

“Why did you call me by my second name and not my first?” I ask. I presume that she and Dad, especially Dad, thought Arabella, a beautiful romantic name, inapplicable to me from the very beginning, so they opted instead for starchy Beatrice. But I’d like the detail.

“A few weeks before you were born we’d been to the National Theatre to see Much Ado About Nothing,” Mum replies. She must see my surprise because she adds, “Your father and I used to do things like that; before children came along, we’d go to London for the evening and get the last train home. Beatrice is the heroine. She’s so plucky. And outspoken. Her own person. Even as a baby, it suited you. Your father said Arabella was too wishy-washy for you.”

Mum’s answer is so unexpected, and I am a little stunned, actually. I wonder whether, had I known the reason