Sister

There’s a slight pause before he answers. “Yes. I’ll still pay my share of the mortgage, of course, until it’s sold.”

Karen is his new girlfriend. When he told me, I felt guiltily relieved that he had found a relationship so quickly.

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” says Todd and I think he wants me to mind. He sounds falsely cheerful. “I expect it’s a little like you and me, with the shoe on the other foot.”

I have no idea what I can say to that.

“ ‘If equal affections cannot be,’ ” says Todd, his tone light, but I know not to misinterpret that now. I dread him adding “let the more loving one be me.”

We say good-bye.

I reminded you I studied literature, didn’t I? I’ve had an endless supply of quotations at my disposal, but they have always highlighted the inadequacy of my life rather than provided an uplifting literary score to it.

Mr. Wright comes back with the cakes and cups of tea and we have five minutes’ time out from my statement and talk instead about small inconsequential things: the unseasonably warm weather, the bulbs in St. James’s Park, the emerging peony in your garden. Our tea together feels a little romantic, in a safe nineteenth-century kind of way, though I doubt Jane Austen’s heroines took tea from Styrofoam cups and had cakes packed inside clear plastic boxes.

I hope he isn’t slighted that I was too nauseated to finish my cake.

After our tea, we go back over a couple of pages in my statement as he double-checks a few points, and then he suggests we end for the day. He has to stay and finish off some paperwork, but he still accompanies me to the lift. As we walk down the long corridor, past empty unlit offices, it feels as if he’s escorting me to my front door. He waits for the lift doors to open and I am safely inside.

I leave the CPS offices and go to meet Kasia. I’m blowing two days’ wages on tickets for the London Eye, which I had promised her. But I’m worn out, my limbs feel too heavy to belong to me, and I just want to go home and sleep. When I see the length of the queues, I resent the Eye that’s turned London into an urban Cyclops.

I spot Kasia waving at me from the front of a queue. She must have been waiting for hours. People are glancing at her, probably afraid she’s about to go into labor in one of the capsules.

I join her and ten minutes later we are “boarding.”

As our capsule climbs higher, London unfurls beneath us and I no longer feel so ill or tired, but actually elated. And I think that although I’m hardly robust, at least I didn’t black out today, which must be a good sign. So maybe I should allow myself to hope that I’ve survived this intact, that everything really might be okay.

I point out the sights to Kasia, asking people on the south side to move so I can show her Big Ben, Battersea Power Station, the House of Commons, Westminster Bridge. As I wave my arms around, showing off London to Kasia, I feel surprised, not just by the pride I feel for my city but also by the word my. I’d opted to live in New York, an Atlantic Ocean away, but for no discernible reason I feel a sense of belonging here.

14

monday

This morning I have woken up ludicrously early. Pudding is a furry, purring cushion on my legs (I never used to understand why you took in a stray). Mr. Wright told me that today we are going to cover your funeral and at five-thirty I give up on the idea of sleep and go out into your garden. I ought to go through it in my mind first, make sure I can remember what’s important, but my thoughts flinch when I try to look backward with any focus. Instead I look at the leaves and buds now flourishing along the lengths of the once-presumed-dead twigs. But there has been one fatality, I’m afraid. The Constance Spry rose was killed by a fox urinating, so in her place I’ve planted a Cardinal Richelieu. No fox would dare to wee on him.

I feel a coat draped around my shoulders and then see Kasia sleepily stumbling back to bed. Your dressing gown doesn’t meet over her bump anymore. There are only three days to go now till her due date. She’s asked me to be her birthing partner, her “doula” (it sounds too posh for my rudimentary knowledge of what to do). You never told me about doulas when you asked me to be with you when you had Xavier; you just asked me to be there. Perhaps you thought I’d find it all a little off-putting. (You’d have been right.) Or with you I didn’t need a special name. I’m your sister. And Xavier’s aunt. That’s enough.

You might think Kasia is giving me a second chance after I failed you. But although that would be easy, it’s not true. Nor is she a walking, talking Prozac course. But she has forced me to look into the future. Remember Todd telling me “Life has to go on”? But as my life couldn’t rewind to a time you were still alive, I’d wanted to pause it; moving forward was selfish. But Kasia’s growing baby (a girl, she found out) is a visual reminder that life does go on, the opposite of a memento mori. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a memento vitae.

Amias was right: the morning chorus is really noisy out here. The birds have been singing fit to burst for an hour already. I try to remember the order he told me about and think it must be the larks’ turn now. As I listen to what I think is a wood-lark playing notes similar to Bach’s preludes, a little amazed and strangely comforted, I remember your funeral.

The night before, I stayed in Little Hadston in my old bedroom. I hadn’t slept in a single bed for years and I found the narrowness of it and the tightly tucked in sheets and the heavy eiderdown securely comforting. I got up at 5:30 but when I went downstairs, Mum was already in the kitchen. There were two mugs of coffee on the table. She gave me one. “I would have brought your coffee up to your room for you, but I didn’t want to wake you.” I knew before I took a sip that it would be cold. Outside it was dark with the sound of rain hammering down. Mum distractedly drew back the curtains as if you could see something outside, but it was still dark and all she could see was her own reflection.

“When someone dies, they can be any age you remember, can’t they?” she asked. As I tried to think of a reply she continued, “You probably think about the grown-up Tess, because you were still close to her. But when I woke up, I thought of her when she was three, wearing a fairy skirt I’d got her in Woolworth’s and a policeman’s helmet. Her wand was a wooden spoon. On the bus yesterday I imagined holding her when she was two days old. I felt the warmth of her. I remembered all her fingers clasped around my finger, so tiny they didn’t even meet. I remembered the shape of her head, and stroking the nape of her neck till she slept. I remembered her smell. She smelled of innocence. Other times, she’s thirteen and so pretty that I worry for her every time I see a man look at her. All of