If Only I Could Tell You

by Hannah Beckerman

  Lily backs silently out of the room and onto the landing, closing the door quietly behind her. Her heart is still thundering in her chest, her cheeks hot, the air slowly—finally—escaping from her lungs. She feels tears in her eyes and she blinks them away because she knows that if they begin to fall there will be no way of stopping them.

  “What are you doing?”

  Lily jumps around, startled, the silent terror of the last few minutes shattered by the sight of Jess, at the top of the stairs, staring at her.

  There follows a stand-off between them, Jess demanding to go in and see Zoe, Lily knowing that she has to do everything in her power to stop her.

  The alarm on Lily’s digital watch beeps and she jerks her hand to turn it off, frantic that her mum shouldn’t hear, that she shouldn’t know she and Jess are loitering outside.

  Lily holds her sister’s gaze, willing Jess to turn and walk away. And when, eventually, Jess retreats and begins to go down the stairs, Lily knows she must follow close behind.

  All the way to school Lily manages not to cry. She must not let Jess see that she is upset, must not let her know that there is already cause to be grieving. But when they reach the school gates—when she has safely deposited Jess in the junior school playground and rounded the corner to her own senior school—she walks up the stairs to the top-floor toilets that are always empty at this time and locks herself inside. There she allows the horror of the past thirty minutes to catch up with her in loud, lonely sobs that reverberate around the cubicle as if they will never be silenced.

  Chapter 61

  Jess

  Jess’s head reeled: a sense that the bench, her body, her feet were no longer anchored to the ground.

  Her mum looked at her and Jess saw it in her eyes: an expression that tipped Jess’s world onto a different axis, sent it spinning out of control.

  And then there was a torrent of words, unstoppable and unrelenting, her mum talking and talking, confessing to something Jess didn’t want to hear: something that undid the past and recast the present.

  “You have to believe me, both of you. I did what I thought was best for Zoe.”

  Her mum dragged a tissue along her cheek and Jess turned to look at her, but it was as if she were staring at a stranger. “The best? How can you say that? How can that possibly have been the best for Zoe?”

  There was hysteria in her voice, and passersby turned to stare but her words had a momentum of their own and Jess couldn’t stop them.

  Her mum reached out, tried to take her hand, but Jess yanked it away.

  “She was going to die, Jess. There was nothing any of us could do to change that. We brought her home to die.”

  Her mum spoke softly but the words jabbed into Jess’s chest. “Why didn’t you tell me that at the time? Why did you all pretend that she was coming home because she was better? You should have told me the truth. She was my twin. I had a right to know.”

  Her mum began to weep again, and Jess turned her head away, felt the blood pounding in her ears. “What about Dad? Did he know? Did the two of you plan it together?”

  Her mum coughed into her hand, wiped it on a tissue, shook her head. “Dad wasn’t involved at all. He didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t tell him until after the funeral.”

  Pieces of a jigsaw Jess had never been able to complete began to slot into place. Hazy scenes from her childhood pulled into focus as if they had been waiting all these years to be restored. Coming in from the garden one day that summer—barefoot, unintentionally silent—hearing her parents hissing at one another in the kitchen, the words long since forgotten but the tone of animosity and contrition still audible in her ears. Her dad’s changed demeanor that summer, his kindness and affection replaced by distant coldness, and Jess’s belief that it must be her fault for reminding him of the daughter he had lost. The four of them having Sunday lunch, the kitchen silent save for the muted orchestra of cutlery against crockery, her mum reaching out a hand toward her dad’s arm and him flinching, glaring at her and speaking with a ferocity Jess had never heard before: Don’t. Just don’t. All those nights her dad had failed to come home before Jess went to sleep, all those nights she had lain under the duvet, alone on the bottom bunk bed, believing her dad could no longer bear to be in the same house as her because he resented her for still being alive when her funny, brave, superior twin was dead.

  “That’s why Dad killed himself, isn’t it? He couldn’t bear what you’d done?”

  Her mum nodded, and it was as though Jess could feel her family’s foundations shifting beneath her. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me think he didn’t care about us when all along it was your fault he killed himself?” She was shouting now, her voice hot, her throat raw. “Why did you never tell me the truth? Why did you let me think Zoe might get better? Why didn’t you let me say goodbye?”

  Decades of confusion and grief swam in Jess’s head until a single, lonely thought rose to the surface, a thought Jess had kept submerged for almost thirty years.

  “All I ever wanted was to say goodbye.”

  Chapter 62

  Audrey

  As Jess staggered up from the bench, Audrey reached out a hand and heard her own plaintive cry: “Jess, please don’t go.” But Jess wrenched her arm away and ran along the path, back in the direction of the hotel. Audrey felt her legs prepare to follow but as she tried to raise herself to her feet, it was as though her muscles had dissolved and there was nothing solid to hold her up. Her eyes followed Jess through the park until she rounded a corner and disappeared.

  She turned to Lily, a horde of questions lining her throat. “Why did you never say anything? Why did you never tell me that you’d seen what happened?”

  Lily was fiddling with one of the shiny black buttons on her jacket, popping it through the hole and then doing it back up again. “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

  “Why not? I can’t bear to think of you having kept that to yourself all these years. It must have been torture for you.” The thought of Lily alone with that burden of knowledge pressed down hard on Audrey’s windpipe, squeezing the air from her lungs.

  “Because I knew it would be worse for you if you found out I’d seen it all. I knew it would make it so much harder for you.”

  It took a moment for the lump in Audrey’s throat to make space for her voice to find its way out. “You were fifteen, Lily. You shouldn’t have had to deal with that all by yourself.”

  Lily shrugged, and there was something in the gesture that rolled back the decades to the weeks after Zoe’s death, when Lily had demanded so little time and attention. Now Audrey couldn’t understand why she had failed to see that Lily was perhaps the most disturbed of them all. “I’m sorry, Lily. I’m sorry for what you saw, and I’m sorry you’ve been alone with it all this time. Have you never told anyone?”

  Audrey watched the slow rise and fall of Lily’s ribs, wondering how she could love someone so much and yet know so little of what had troubled them for decades.

  “No. But you don’t need to apologize. It’s not your fault I’ve kept it to myself. I couldn’t say anything . . .” Lily shook her head, deep vertical grooves indenting the skin between her eyebrows.

  “What is it? What were you going to say?”

  Audrey kept watch on Lily’s profile as she stared out across the boating lake into the distance as if looking back in time.

  “I couldn’t say anything because I was worried it was all my fault.”

  The words were almost a whisper, as if even now, after all this time, they still weren’t quite ready to come out of hiding.

  “What do you mean? How could it have been your fault?”

  Lily didn’t immediately reply. Audrey could hear squeals coming from somewhere on the lake but she didn’t turn her head to look, didn’t care about anyone else’s joy or pain. She kept her eyes on Lily, searching for clues.

  “Because of what I said in the kitchen that morning.”

 
A single plump tear crept over Lily’s bottom eyelid before trickling onto her cheek below.

  “When? What did you say?”

  Lily turned to her, her expression caught somewhere between a question and remorse. “In the kitchen, with you and Dad, a few days after Zoe came home from the hospital. It was a Sunday morning. You must remember?”

  Audrey tried to rewind her memory in search of the conversation Lily might be referring to. “I’m sorry, darling, I honestly don’t know what conversation you mean.”

  “You must remember. Zoe and Jess were still in bed but you, me, and Dad were up really early and you made me some hot chocolate and I got really upset about Zoe . . .” Lily’s words trailed off and her eyes drifted across the park as if watching her voice disappear, unsure whether to chase it back.

  “What, Lily? What did you say? I honestly don’t remember.”

  There was a heartbeat of silence.

  “I was really upset about Zoe. Really upset. I said that people treat pets better than humans. I begged you and Dad to do something. I begged you to put an end to her suffering—”

  Lily stopped abruptly and Audrey felt the past lurch into the present. She remembered now. Sitting at the kitchen table, she and Edward flanking Lily, their arms around her shoulders. Lily had been hysterical and all Audrey had wanted was to stop her crying, soothe her distress. All she had really wanted, the memory squeezing her throat, was to calm Lily down so that she could return to Zoe’s bedside.

  “Sweetheart, we were all upset in those last few weeks. We all said things in the heat of the moment we didn’t really mean. But nothing you said—nothing you did—contributed to my decision. I promise you. You are not in any way responsible for what I did.”

  “But I am. I must have been. I must have planted the seed.”

  Audrey shook her head, trying to slot all the new information into place. All these years Lily had blamed herself for Zoe’s death because of a conversation Audrey hadn’t even remembered. “You didn’t, Lily. I promise you didn’t. You mustn’t think that, please.” She took Lily’s hand, felt the New York humidity between their clammy palms.

  “What about Dad?” Lily’s voice was low and flat as though she’d ironed all the creases before letting it out.

  “What do you mean? What about Dad?”

  “I heard you. After Zoe’s funeral. I heard you tell Dad what you’d done. I know he was furious with you. And I can’t help thinking . . .”

  “What? What can’t you help thinking?”

  A slow trickle of tears fell down Lily’s cheeks. Audrey smoothed her thumb over the back of Lily’s hand, wondering whether she could ever soothe away a past that had, for so long, contaminated the present.

  “I should have said something. I should have stopped you. Because if I had . . .”

  “If you had what?”

  Lily didn’t speak for a few seconds and when she did, the words sounded small, far away, as though they belonged not to the forty-three-year-old woman sitting next to Audrey on a bench in Central Park but to the teenager who’d first thought them almost three decades before.

  “If I’d stopped you then you wouldn’t have needed to confess to Dad and he’d never have got so angry and maybe he’d still be alive today.” The tears dropped, one after the other, onto the pale gray silk of Lily’s skirt where they dilated into large, dark circles.

  “Lily, Dad’s death was not your fault. If anyone’s responsible for Dad’s suicide, it’s me, not you. It was not your job to stop me doing what I did. And it was certainly not your job to stop Dad doing what he did. You were fifteen, Lily. Fifteen. Two years younger than Phoebe is now. You were just a child. You are not responsible.”

  Audrey put her arms around Lily and held her tight, hoping that somehow, in the closeness of their embrace, Lily might find enough love to forgive herself. “I’m sorry, Lily. I’m so sorry I didn’t do more to help you come to terms with it.”

  They sat holding one another as all the years of lonely guilt began to seep out through Lily’s tears. As the sun beat down on them, Audrey wondered whether there might be a way for it to burn through the secrets that had poisoned her family for decades.

  As they sat there, a single desire nudged its way into Audrey’s thoughts: the possibility that perhaps it wasn’t too late to rewrite this story with a different ending. “Lily, I know this is all still very raw, but do you think you could do something for me?”

  Lily turned to her, mascara smudged across her mottled skin.

  “Can you go and find Jess, talk to her, try to sort this out? It’s all such a mess of misunderstandings. None of this ever needed to happen.” The truth scorched Audrey’s throat: all those wasted years because of a collection of tales told in lieu of the truth.

  “But you need to talk to her too, Mum. You need to tell her your side of the story.”

  An image flashed into Audrey’s mind: three little girls—Lily aged nine, the twins aged four—playing in the garden, the sun streaming through the leaves on the trees as Lily tried to teach her little sisters how to perform handstands. Zoe and Jess—their faces almost indistinguishable—placing their palms flat on the grass, kicking their legs into the air only to have them tip straight back to earth. Frustration mounting until Lily took their ankles, lifted them up, delivered them their moment of assisted triumph. The twins returning to their feet and hugging their big sister, arms around her waist, and her taking their hands, forming a circle with them, dancing and singing. Audrey watching from the kitchen window knowing that of all the relationships her girls must cherish throughout their lives, those sibling bonds were the ones she hoped would see them through to the end of their days.

  “I can do that later. But right now, all I want is for you two to start talking again, for you two . . .”

  The thought got trapped, halfway formed: that there would come a time, very soon, when what mattered was not Audrey’s relationship with her daughters but, in her absence, her daughters’ relationship with each other.

  “I just want you two to be sisters again. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. Can you try and do that for me? Please?”

  Chapter 63

  Jess

  Running into the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, her thoughts sprinting ahead of her, Jess heard a man’s voice call her name. She turned to see who it was.

  “Hey, Jess. Is everything all right?”

  It took Jess a few moments to place him, not because she didn’t recognize him but because she hadn’t expected to see him there. She hadn’t, in truth, expected to see him ever again.

  “Ben? What are you doing here?”

  “Do you mean here in New York or here at the Plaza? I’ve moved back here now—didn’t your mom mention it? She was the catalyst, if I’m honest. I said I’d meet her for a quick drink this evening. Do you know where she is?”

  Jess thought about her mum sitting in the park and about how, just a few minutes before, she had watched the past change before her eyes. And before she knew it was going to happen, she burst into tears.

  “What’s wrong? What’s happened? Audrey’s OK, isn’t she?”

  Jess managed to nod, her head heavy with confessions, uncertain what she was supposed to do with them all.

  “So what’s the matter?”

  She felt Ben’s hand on her shoulder, and suddenly the afternoon’s events were spilling out of her mouth. As Ben led her to a sofa in the corner of the lobby she told him about her terrible misunderstanding, her false accusation, the needless family rupture she had caused. He listened without interrupting as she described a twenty-eight-year estrangement that now made her feel physically sick with shame and regret. And what surprised Jess was not that she was pouring out her confession to a man she barely knew but how very easy it was to confide in him.

  “So, you see, I’ve ruined my entire family because of a misunderstanding when I was ten years old. That’s all it was—a misunderstanding. All this time I’ve been angry with Lily when she’d done
nothing wrong.”

  Jess thought about batting away her mum’s arm as it had reached out toward her. Her mum so frail where once she had been strong. This, the first afternoon of a trip that was supposed to have plugged the gap of her mum’s disappointments, but had instead shattered what small pretense of stability they had left. She couldn’t tell Ben about what her mum had done, however deep her desire to confide in someone: even in the heat of her anger, she knew it would be too great a betrayal.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You were just a child. God, it’s difficult enough making sense of life and death when you’re an adult. You can’t possibly be expected to understand it when you’re ten. And losing a twin—I can’t even begin to imagine how hard that must have been. It’s only natural you’d want to find someone to blame.”

  “I’m not sure it’s normal to hate your sister for nearly three decades because of something she didn’t even do. Looking back now, I don’t really understand how I let it happen.”

  Guilt nestled in the back of Jess’s throat.

  “Because you’re human? Because we all make mistakes? Because dealing with grief is probably the hardest thing any of us ever has to do? You wouldn’t be the first person to cut yourself off from your family as a means of managing your pain, and I doubt very much you’ll be the last.”

  Jess thought back to the night before Zoe died, lying in bed with her sister, reading aloud the poems of their childhood: “The King’s Breakfast,” “Binker,” “Us Two.” Jess’s belief as she snuggled up beside Zoe that soon her twin would be better, soon the two of them would be sharing their bunk beds again, soon Zoe would return to school where Jess had spent the last year feeling as though half of her was missing, not wanting to make new friends because somehow that would acknowledge the possibility that Zoe might not return.