Sister полностью

I walked the half mile from Little Hadston station to the church, and saw Mum in the graveyard. I told you about my lunch with her just a few days ago, jumping ahead in the chronology of the story so I could reassure you and be fair to her. So you already know how she changed after you died, how she became again the mum of babyhood in the rustling dressing gown, smelling of face cream and reassurance in the dark. Warm and loving, she’s also become worryingly vulnerable. It was at your funeral that she changed. It wasn’t a gradual process but horrifyingly fast, her silent scream as you were lowered into the wet mud shattering all of her character artifices, leaving the core of her exposed. And in that shattering moment, her fiction around your death disintegrated. She knew, as I did, that you would never have killed yourself. And that violent knowledge leached the strength from her spine and stripped the color from her hair.

But every time I saw her, so old and gray now, it was newly shocking.

“Mum?”

She turned and I saw tears on her face. She hugged me tightly and pressed her face against my shoulder. I felt her tears through my shirt. She pulled away, trying to laugh. “Shouldn’t use you as a hanky, should I?”

“That’s fine, anytime.”

She stroked my hair. “All that hair. It needs a cut.”

“I know.”

I put my arm around her.

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.”