If Only I Could Tell You

by Hannah Beckerman

  “What are you doing?”

  Lily jumps around, her face flushed, eyes darting from left to right as if scrabbling to get her bearings. “Why are you creeping up on me like that?” she hisses at Jess in an angry whisper that does not sound like her usual voice.

  “We’re not supposed to go in there this morning. We were told not to.”

  It is true. Less than forty minutes earlier, over breakfast, Jess had asked if she could say goodbye to Zoe before she left for school, but her dad’s response had been one of those sighs that had gone on so long it had made Jess wish she’d never asked the question.

  No, Zoe’s resting this morning. You had a lovely time reading to her last night, didn’t you? Just leave her be this morning, OK?

  The way her dad had said it, Jess had known that, in spite of the upward inflection at the end of his sentence, he wasn’t really asking a question at all.

  It was true that the previous evening Jess had spent a lovely time with Zoe. She had curled up in the double bed in the spare room where Zoe now slept, and read aloud the collections of poems they used to recite as little children—When We Were Very Young, Now We Are Six—poems about beetles and bears and buttercup days that seemed to belong to a different, kinder world. Zoe had drifted in and out of sleep—she had done that a lot since she’d come home from the hospital—so Jess hadn’t been sure how much she’d actually heard, but that hadn’t mattered. She didn’t mind that Zoe’s room smelled a bit strange: a thick, sticky, sweet smell that clung to the hairs inside Jess’s nose and refused to be sniffed away. She just liked being close to her twin, cuddling up in bed together, just as they’d done every night before Zoe got ill.

  “Do not tell Mum I was in there. I mean it, Jess. You don’t want to be a telltale.”

  Lily’s voice is quiet but firm, full of anger and warning, and there is a look in her eyes that Jess recognizes from all the times she has caught Lily using the telephone when their mum has told her not to, or the afternoons she has seen Lily smoking with her friends behind the children’s playground in the park.

  There is a moment of uncertainty, neither of them knowing what Jess’s next move will be. Until her left foot joins her right on the top stair, Jess isn’t sure what she’s going to do next either.

  “I want to go in too.”

  The two sisters glare at one another and Jess feels something pass between them: something unknowable yet frightening that she can’t, or daren’t, articulate.

  “You are not to go in there, Jess. Do you hear me?”

  Lily’s body blocks the door, her arm stretched behind her as if in the process of being arrested. Around the corner of Lily’s body, Jess can see her sister’s hand gripping the handle, a final barrier should Jess get that far.

  “But I want to. If you’ve been in there, why shouldn’t I?” Jess edges along the landing, emboldened by what she senses to be Lily’s fragile hold over the situation.

  “Stop it. I mean it, Jess. You must not go in.”

  The expression on Lily’s face sends a cold chill tiptoeing along Jess’s spine: her sister’s flushed cheeks, narrowed eyes, pinched eyebrows. The panic trying to disguise itself as authority. It is unclear whether Lily is about to defend herself or launch an attack. Jess knows there is only one emotion that pulls her sister’s face into that expression: guilt. Except this guilt is unlike anything Jess has seen before. It is so powerful that it saturates the empty space on the landing until Jess can feel it filling her lungs.

  Fragments of Lily’s telephone conversation from two weeks before begin to repeat in Jess’s head like a musical refrain she is unable to silence. Sometimes it just feels like they’ve forgotten they’ve still got two other children. It’s like we don’t exist anymore. And then the memory of Lily sobbing to their mum and dad a few days later: No one should have to be in that much pain. For goodness’ sake, people do more for sick pets than they do for people. There must be something we can do. I wish it could all be over. She remembers the strange voice with which Lily had spoken, and their dad’s angry reply, a response Jess hadn’t understood at the time. But now, all of a sudden, Jess feels as though she understands everything, all those conversations she was never meant to hear. And now that she does understand, she wishes with all her heart that she didn’t.

  Jess’s stomach somersaults beneath the elasticized waistband of her bottle-green skirt. She feels the blood pulsing at her wrists, trying to force her to confront the possibility of what has taken place inside that bedroom. Her heart pounds as if her body is urging her into action. She imagines taking a step forward and pushing Lily aside, a struggle in which she manages—against Lily’s advanced years and superior strength—to emerge victorious. But thoughts of what might happen afterward—what she might see and what she might learn—cement her feet to the floor.

  The alarm on Lily’s digital watch beeps. Lily jerks her hand to turn it off and Jess feels herself flinch. She knows it is Lily’s 8:30 a.m. alarm, the one her sister has set to ensure they leave for school on time now that their parents are too distracted to remind them. Lily holds Jess’s gaze for a few seconds more until Jess is the first to turn her head away. Jess begins to make her way down the stairs, and only then does she realize that her legs are trembling. She hears Lily’s footsteps close on her heels but does not turn around. She cannot bear to see that look on Lily’s face again: a look that has told Jess something she does not want to know.

  All the way down, Jess contemplates finding her mum, telling her where Lily has been, what she thinks has taken place inside that bedroom. But by the time Jess reaches the bottom stair, she knows she cannot. To tell her mum would be to voice suspicions Jess is not yet ready to assert, things she does not, at the age of ten, have the courage to say out loud.

  Jess can barely breathe as she opens the front door. She has passed the day in a trance, the fear of what she might discover when she gets home churning in her stomach. As she walks through the door, anxiety scratches at her skin.

  Stepping into the hallway, there is a stillness, as though her entry has disrupted the most delicate of equilibriums. She stops and listens, and it is then that she hears the noise that causes her heart to drum in her chest.

  It is the sound of her mum crying. Not the quiet, muffled sobs Jess has become accustomed to in recent months, but noisy, uninhibited, primitive cries.

  And in those few, potent seconds between entering the house and her dad opening the sitting room door and ushering her inside, Jess experiences a moment of clarity she has never known before.

  She knows, immediately, that Zoe is dead. She knows that what she saw this morning—Lily standing outside Zoe’s door, face flushed with guilt, hands clutching the door handle, refusing Jess entry as if her innocence depended on it—was the aftermath of something so awful that to think about it makes Jess feel as though her heart is being clamped in a vise. She knows, as she enters the sitting room and falls into her mum’s arms, that in spite of the way her mum holds her tightly, rocks her back and forth, says I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, over and over again, it is not her mum or her dad or even leukemia that is to blame for Zoe’s death. It is Lily.

  What Jess understands as she cocoons herself inside her mum’s embrace—as hot, fat tears stream down her cheeks—is that she has lost not one sister today but two. She has lost the twin with whom her life has been inextricably linked since before they were born. Without her, Jess knows she will never feel complete again. But as grief squeezes her throat and blood pounds in her ears, she understands that Zoe is not the only sister she has lost today. She knows that she will never forgive Lily for what she has done. As of today, she is not one of three siblings but an only child.

  The remainder of the afternoon passes in a blur and yet, in years to come, Jess will remember fragments of it in such microscopic detail it is as though her brain had been set on automatic timer, capturing individual frames at regular intervals: sitting next to Lily on the dusky pink sofa in the sitting room, fl
inching every time Lily tries to touch her, speak to her, catch her eye; the sound of murmured voices from the kitchen below rising up through the floorboards like audible phantoms, conversations Jess wants to be neither a part of nor excluded from; the front door opening and closing, anonymous footsteps padding along the hallway, some heading upstairs, others down; Mrs. Sheppard popping her permed head around the sitting room door, exchanging silent communications with Lily that Jess is on the verge of being able to decipher but cannot yet decode; Lily trying to comfort her when all Jess wants is to shout at her: I know what you did and I will never, ever forgive you.

  Shortly before the time they would normally have dinner, her mum comes into the sitting room and Lily leaves, saying she needs the bathroom. Jess knows that this is her chance to disclose what she saw, perhaps the only opportunity she will have all day.

  She feels the revelation scorch her tongue, knows she must tell her mum what Lily has done. Her lips part, the accusation fizzing impatiently in her mouth.

  But then, next to her, she hears her mum’s chest heaving, followed by the most terrible, keening howl Jess has ever heard. Her mum holds Jess tight in her arms, and sobs ferociously until Jess’s dad comes in to rescue them both.

  Jess feels her lips close against an unspeakable truth.

  She will tell her mum later, she thinks, when there are not so many people around, when the stillness is no longer punctured by grief and her mum’s face has reverted to its normal shape.

  Later, Jess thinks. Later she will be able to unburden herself of this terrible knowledge.

  Two and a half weeks have passed since Zoe’s death. The funeral has been and gone. The four remaining members of Jess’s family move among one another like ghosts, unable—or unwilling—to acknowledge each other’s grief.

  Their mum has not yet returned to work and Jess has begun to speculate that perhaps she never will. Perhaps she will spend every day, forevermore, in her bedroom crying into the duvet, as though the muffled sound does not travel through doors and walls, into Jess’s bedroom with its redundant bunk beds where Jess has got used to plugging her fingers in her ears every night.

  Today Jess sits cross-legged on the sofa watching Blue Peter. The presenters are in Russia, a country which seems so far away that it might as well be a foreign planet, but Jess likes the look of its grand palaces and deep blue rivers, and wonders whether she might, one day, see it for herself. She scratches at a gnat bite on her bare leg: she is wearing shorts and a T-shirt in honor of sports day earlier at school, Jess the only pupil without either parent to cheer her on. Her hand digs into the biscuit packet for her fourth chocolate digestive of the afternoon.

  The door opens and as Lily walks into the room, Jess feels her stomach whirl like the drum of a washing machine.

  “What are you watching, Jess?”

  Jess ignores her and stares straight ahead at the TV.

  “Jess? Did you hear me?”

  Jess feels her heart thumping and hopes Lily cannot hear it. She does not want to give herself away, does not want Lily to guess what she knows, not before Jess has found the right time to tell their mum. But this is what happens now, whenever she and Lily are alone in a room together: Jess’s body threatens to betray her. She does not know whether it is because she is scared she may say something she shouldn’t, or because she knows what her sister is capable of.

  Lily flops down on the sofa next to her and Jess instinctively shifts a few inches to the left.

  “Are you OK, Jess? Look, I know how hard this is—especially with Mum being how she is right now—but things will get easier, I promise.”

  Lily’s voice sounds different, as though she is trying on grown-up reassurance for size and discovering that it doesn’t quite fit.

  “Jess, please talk to me. I know how you feel. We’re all grieving. We’re all going through the same thing. I know it’s worse for you because you two were so close, but you might feel better if you talk about it.”

  Jess does not know what it is that finally provokes her to ask the question that has been burning her tongue for eighteen days, but suddenly there it is between them before she has a chance to stop it.

  “What happened in Zoe’s bedroom that day?” Her voice sounds bolder than she had imagined it would.

  “What day? What are you talking about?”

  “The day Zoe died.”

  Panic skitters across Lily’s face like marbles across cobblestones. “What do you mean, what happened? You know what happened.”

  There is such force in Lily’s response that Jess’s confidence begins to falter. But the look on Lily’s face—the same expression she’d worn as she’d barricaded herself in front of Zoe’s bedroom door—gives her the courage to continue. “No, I don’t. And I want to know.”

  In the few hesitant seconds of silence, something more than fear or panic flares in Lily’s eyes. There is guilt. And it is all the confirmation Jess needs.

  Lily gets up from the sofa and storms toward the door, her voice trailing behind her. “You’re being completely impossible, Jess. You’re making everything harder for everyone. Just stop asking questions, OK? Just stop it.”

  Lily charges out of the room and there is a part of Jess that wants to run after her, challenge her, finish a conversation that has only just begun. But when she thinks about following Lily, when she thinks about saying what is really on her mind, her determination flounders. The accusation is so big and frightening, Jess can still not imagine saying it out loud. To say it aloud would be to give it a permanence she is not yet ready to accept.

  Instead, she turns back to Blue Peter, to stories of a Russian world far enough away from her own to distract her from truths she does not know how to manage.

  Almost exactly three months later, with the secret still burning in her chest, Jess’s netball practice is canceled and she decides—on a whim she will never fully understand—to take herself home to an empty house. She plans to retrieve the spare front door key from the flowerpot in the garden shed and let herself in, to spend the next hour at home alone with a hot chocolate, Oreos, and Grange Hill. And it is there that she discovers her dad swinging from a beam at the top of the stairs, the cord of her mum’s navy blue dressing gown knotted unambiguously around his neck.

  What creeps across every inch of her skin—before the shock hits her brain, before the adrenaline floods her bloodstream, before the first screams erupt from her throat—is a white-hot fury like nothing she has ever experienced before. As she stands in the hallway of the only home she has ever known, looking up at her dad’s body suspended from a makeshift noose, Jess experiences a febrile certainty that this is all Lily’s fault.

  As her first screams emerge, a single thought pounds inside Jess’s head: Lily now has blood on her hands for the death of not one person but two.

  For the next twenty-eight years, people will assume that the worst fate ever to befall Jess is to have discovered her father’s body at the top of the stairs. Jess will choose never to contradict them. She will tell no one the truth. She will never confess that in fact the worst thing that has ever happened to her is not her father taking his own life, but Lily taking Zoe’s. She will never explain to anyone that, over the course of a single summer, she lost her entire family: the deaths of her twin sister and her dad; her older sister never to be trusted again; her mum forever at arm’s length, Jess’s determination to shield her from the truth creating an impenetrable barrier of tension and mistrust between them.

  Zoe’s death becomes, over the years, an all-consuming absence. It is an absence that leaves Jess feeling as though someone has sliced away a piece of her heart that she knows will never be returned and can never be replaced. And beyond Zoe’s absence are the concentric circles of loss that ripple out from that kernel of grief: the adults Jess no longer trusts for their failure to prevent so heinous a crime; the friends and boyfriends she rejects for fear that intimacy may lead to disclosure; the family from whom she is estranged. It is kno
wledge that isolates Jess from the rest of the world, like a patient in quarantine who fears infecting others with the truth.

  At times the loneliness devours her. There are moments when she has a burning need to confide in someone—therapists, telephone helplines, the police—but each time her courage fails her. She is too fearful of the evil spirits that may emerge if she opens that Pandora’s box. Every time she imagines it, all she can picture is the horror on her mum’s face: the shock, the pain, and the renewed grief.

  Instead, Jess remains silent, conscious of her own impotence, the secret slowly strangling her every day of her life.

  Chapter 47

  Jess

  A waiter brushed past Jess and she looked around the restaurant, the white noise of diners’ conversations slowly filtering into her ears as though someone was turning up the volume and pulling her back into the present.

  “Please sit down, both of you. Just for five minutes, that’s all I’m asking.”

  There was desperation in her mum’s voice and Jess didn’t know whether to resent it or give in to it.

  She watched Lily sit, sensed her mum silently urging her to do the same. Seconds passed, then half a minute, Jess’s body tensing, urging her to leave. But then she thought about her mum singing onstage less than two hours before, the triumph on her face as she’d taken her fourth and final bow, and suddenly she found herself stepping forward, pulling out a chair at the end of the table, and sitting down.

  Allowing her eyes to flick briefly to where Mia and Phoebe were sandwiching their grandmother, Jess fixed her gaze firmly forward as her mum took in a deep breath.

  “I don’t want to get maudlin but sometimes I can’t help feeling that in the year Zoe and your dad died, someone pressed the emergency stop button on my life and I just stopped moving. It’s as though I’ve spent the past thirty years treading water and it’s taken me all this time to see how static my life has been.”