Sister

Dad had gone back to France, with no promises of phone calls or visits, honest enough now not to make promises he couldn’t keep. I know that I am loved by him but that he won’t be present in my everyday life. So, practically, Mum and I have only each other now. It makes the other one more precious and also not enough. We have to try to fill not only our own boots but other people’s too—yours, Leo’s, Dad’s. We have to expand at the moment we feel the most shrunk.

I put my cornflowers on your grave, which I hadn’t seen since the day of your burial. And as I looked at the earth heaped above you and Xavier, I thought that this is what it all meant—the visits to the police, the hospital, the Internet searches, the questioning and querying and suspicions and accusations—this is what it came down to: you covered with suffocating mud away from light, air, life, love.

I turned to Leo’s grave, and put down my card, an Action Man one, that I think an eight-year-old would like. I’ve never added years to him. Mum had already put on a wrapped-up present, which she’d told me was a remote- control helicopter.

“How did you know he had cystic fibrosis?” I asked.

She told me once that she knew he had it before he showed any signs of illness, but neither she nor Dad knew they were carriers, so how did she know to get him tested? My mind had become accustomed to asking questions, even at Leo’s graveside, even on what should have been his birthday.

“He was still a baby and he was crying,” said Mum. “I kissed his face and his tears tasted salty. I told the GP, just a by-the-by comment, not thinking anything of it. Salty tears are a symptom of cystic fibrosis.”

Remember how even when we were children, she hardly ever kissed us when we cried? But I remember a time when she did, before she tasted the salt in Leo’s tears.

We were silent for a few moments and my eyes went from Leo’s established grave back to your raw one, and I saw how the contrast visualized my state of mourning for each of you.

“I’ve decided on a headstone,” Mum said. “I want an angel, one of those big stone ones with the enveloping wings.”

“I think she’d like an angel.”

“She’d find it ludicrously funny.”

We both half smile, imagining your reaction to a stone angel.

“But I think Xavier would like it,” Mum said. “I mean for a baby an angel’s lovely, isn’t it? Not too sentimental.”

“Not at all.”

She’d got sentimental, though, bringing a teddy each week, and replacing it when it got wet and dirty. She was a little apologetic about it, but not very. The old Mum would have been horrified by the poor taste.

I remembered again our conversation when I told you that you must tell Mum you were pregnant, including the ending that I had forgotten, deliberately, I think.

“Do you still have knickers with days of the week embroidered on them?” you asked.

“You’re changing the subject. And I was given those when I was nine.”

“Did you really wear them on the right day?”

“She’s going to be so hurt, if you don’t tell her.”

Your voice became uncharacteristically serious. “She’ll say things she’ll regret. And she’ll never be able to unsay them.”

You were being kind. You were putting love before truth. But I hadn’t seen that before, thinking you were just making up an excuse—“Avoiding the issue.”

“I’ll tell her when he’s born, Bee. When she’ll love him.”

You always knew she would.

Mum started to plant a Madame Carriere rose in a ceramic pot next to your grave. “It’s just temporary, till the angel arrives. It looks too bare without anything.” I filled a watering can so we could water it in and remembered you as a small child trundling after Mum with your mini gardening tools, your fingers clutched around seeds you’d collected from other plants—aquilegias, I think, but I never really took much notice.

“She used to love gardening, didn’t she?” I asked.

“From the time she was tiny,” said Mum. “It wasn’t till I was in my thirties that I started liking it.”

“So what started you off?”

I was just making conversation, a safe conversation, that I hoped Mum would find soothing. She’s always liked talking about plants.

“When I planted something, it became more and more beautiful, which at thirty-six was the opposite of what was happening to me,” Mum said, testing the soil around the rose with her bare fingers. I saw that her nails were filled with earth. “I shouldn’t have minded losing my looks,” she continued. “But I did then, before Leo died. I think I missed being treated with kindness, with leeway, because I was a pretty girl. The man who came to do our rewiring, a taxi driver once, were unnecessarily unpleasant; men who would normally have done a little extra job for free were aggressive, as if they could tell I had once been pretty, beautiful even, and they didn’t want to know that prettiness fades and ages. It was as if they blamed me for it.”

I was a little taken aback by her, but only a little. Shooting from the hip as a style of conversation was getting almost familiar now. Mum wiped her face with her grimy fingers, leaving a streak of dirt across her cheek. “And then there was Tess growing up, so pretty, and unaware of how generous people were to her because of it.”

“She never played on it though.”

“She didn’t need to. The world held its door open for her and she walked through smiling, thinking it would always be that way.”