The Sister

specimens, recently emerged and vibrant. There’s nothing particularly surprising, perhaps the Carpets are usually farther south, but I’d really like to know where and how they were caught. They must have gone to more than a little effort because I presume it’s from at least two different locations; there’s a couple of Vapourers, which would never cohabit with the Satins and the Underwings. But the real delight for me is a Puss Moth caterpillar that I find all curled up at the bottom of the pile. Now, the Puss Moth is common around here, but it’s still my favorite. It’s the nearest you can get to communicating with a caterpillar. It has a soft coat, zigzagged in green and brown, and when you stroke it, it wriggles and squirms with pleasure. When it gets angry it hisses and waves the two hairlike protrusions on its tail and, if it’s in a real temper, it’ll spit at you.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had the chance to examine a fresh collection. The children who made me this offering have no idea of the delightful distraction they have given me on this particular Monday morning. They will be assuming, perhaps, that because I have bred moths (even, perhaps, bred some of these moths’ forefathers), nurtured their pupae in my cellar and witnessed their first flight in my attic, to discover them half mutilated on my doorstep would make me recoil in horror. They are wrong, of course, for we naturalists strive for the greater proliferation of the entire lepidoptera genera, not for the survival of individuals. The children may be surprised to know how many moths I’ve gassed and pinned; how many caterpillars I’ve rolled, still alive, to squeeze out their insides, reinflating them with wood chip to give them structure; how many peaceful cocoons I’ve dug up and cut open from under the roots of poplars, apples and crack willows. But all of this for a scientific cause, for a greater understanding of and insight into a little-known insect.

3:05 p.m. (by my digital wristwatch)

I am inching along Vivien’s landing, on the other side of the double doors, still in my nightgown and bed socks, and I can feel the pressure of the whole unfamiliar space crowding in on me. I have spent much of the day finding the courage to be here, to check on Vivien myself.

I can see that her door is wide open and I stop on the landing outside it. From this angle I can’t see her, but I can see a slice of her room: the end of her bed and the far corner. Shoes and slippers are stacked up on top of each other in the corner. Next to them I see a little basket and a rug, which I presume are for Simon, and a large plastic Mother and Child attached to an electric cord, which makes me wonder if it lights up or preaches when it’s plugged in. Lifting my gaze to a shelf on the wall, I see a bookstand—the seat of an ugly green marble toad—and next to that, to my delight, an ornate little carriage clock. I’ll be happy to have that clock, I think. You can never have enough clocks. Then I admonish myself for the inappropriate thought outside a dead woman’s room. The clock is at an oblique angle, so I have to move closer to the door frame and peer in for several seconds to read the time. Ten to four. I check it against my wristwatch—much too fast. I tut.

“Ginny, come in.”

A surge of terror. My heart thuds within its cage, and I freeze—right there by the door. The marble toad stares mockingly at me. Oh, my God, she’s not dead! She didn’t drink her milk after all. Every part of me is tight with a fear I’ve never known before. I had been utterly convinced she was dead. Is this her ghost talking? I can’t concentrate enough to think. Am I relieved or frustrated? I had thought I couldn’t bear to see her dead but to see her alive when I think she’s dead feels far worse.

“Ginny,” she says again, weakly, “are you there?”

So she’s guessing. Silently I shift backwards, towards the landing’s double doors, out of sight of the toad. I’m going to leave her. I don’t want to confront her. I’m going to creep away quietly and she’ll never know for sure that I was really here.

“I know you’re there,” she whispers. She’s bluffing, of course….

“Ginny, I know you’re just outside my door. Ginny?” I’m caught. I can’t expose myself now or it would be admitting that I’ve been hiding from her for the past few minutes. But I can’t bring myself to walk away either because now I know she knows I’m here. I lean my head against the landing wall, the other side of her room, defeated. Trapped.

“Look, you don’t have to come in. Stay there and listen if you want,” she continues, as if she knows my every thought and fear. “But please listen. This is very important.”

I am very still. I am very listening.

“Ginny, I’m ill. I think I’m dying. I need you to get me a doctor.”

Oh, my God, she did drink the milk, or, rather, she could have drunk the milk. But, equally, she could be genuinely ill, a torturous coincidence that no one would ever need know about.

No, I can’t get a doctor. I can have someone find her dead, but not ill. Dead old ladies are commended for their contribution in life, laid to rest and, along with their secrets, swallowed forever by the earth. But ill old ladies are investigated until the poison coursing through their bodies is hunted down. And that, as you can imagine, would get me into a lot of trouble. My head is spinning. I want to sit down and tabulate my options. I can’t control them flying about in my head: I need to pull them together on a page and consider them methodically, one by one, but I don’t have that luxury. I’ve been leaning my head against the wall of the landing as I listened, and now I put the palm of my right hand up—flat—just a couple of inches in front of my face so I can stare at it. I find that sometimes this helps me focus my concentration, helps draw it back to me rather than flying off, spiraling out of control.

“Ginny, I know this isn’t easy for you. I understand that.” A few days ago I would have taken comfort in the way she seems to know me inside out, but now I hate it. “But if you go to Eileen’s she will…” I can hear the struggle in her voice as she tries to summon energy. “Ginny, for me…please,” she begs finally.

I am looking at the multitude of crisscrossing lines on the palm of my right hand and the dry calluses on the knobbles at the base of my fingers. As I begin to close the hand, bending it in the middle and curling my deformed fingers, I can see the lines fold in on themselves, making deeper and deeper crevices, until my hand is a fist. Then I notice lines that have not grown out of any folds of a fist—like the ones that run lengthways along the fingers— but have simply matured from a gradual desiccation of the skin.

I want to tell you something now, while we’re in this awful predicament outside Vivien’s room: all my life, it seems, I have sacrificed my own will for those around me. Not that I’ve offered much resistance and not that I haven’t wanted to. But I think you’ll agree that I fall into that category of people who prefer to give than to get, who feel better about themselves when they’ve been helping others and derive satisfaction from knowing that some of their own suffering has directly aided someone else’s, indeed someone they love’s, happiness. But I think even people like us have to believe that, just once or twice in our lives, our love is appreciated, perhaps even reciprocated.

“A doctor…Ginny?”

I open my fist sharply, decisively, last night’s new persona coming to the fore. The range of movement in my knuckles is impressive now. It’s good to exercise arthritic joints, keep them loose so they don’t seize up. I look at Vivien’s door through the gap between my fingers.

“Okay,” I say gently.

I leave the landing, go downstairs and open the front door. I have been forced, for what seems like the first time in my entire life, to make an active decision, a choice. A choice that will have an irreversible impact on the future.

I give myself time for one deep breath of honeysuckle, then close the front door, loudly, so Vivien will hear it upstairs. I go into the library, open the drinks cabinet and find the black tin of potassium cyanide, KCN, behind a sticky bottle of vermouth, where I hid it last night. I’m half surprised to find it there, to have confirmation of my actions during the moonlit hours. I reach to the shelf above for a glass and measure in half a teaspoon of the powder, snapping closed the lid and replacing it behind the vermouth. I suppose this is what is meant by premeditated—the calm and considered preparation of death. But I feel released, unshackled. For the first time ever I am not only in control of my life, I am taking control of the future. For once I am causing an event to happen. Yet at the same time another force is thrusting me forward, an overwhelming one that, to my surprise, makes each action follow the last as if I am paralyzed and looking down on myself with horror.

I am impassive and incurious as I continue. It’s the scientist in me, I know. You learn early on, as a scientist, not to trust your feelings and to rise above any unqualified instinct or emotion. All calculations must be