If Only I Could Tell You

by Hannah Beckerman

  “Honestly? I don’t know. It wasn’t my confession to make. And Mum obviously didn’t want us to know or she’d have told us herself. And can you really blame her? Think what could have happened if anyone had found out.”

  “What’s that got to do with you telling me? What do you think I’d have done if I’d known? Gone to the police? For God’s sake, Lily, don’t you credit me with any integrity at all? I’ve never told anyone what I thought you’d done. I’d have never put Mum in jeopardy like that.”

  “I’m not saying you would. I’m just saying it wasn’t my story to tell.”

  They both fell silent. Lily thought about her mum in Central Park, wondering where she was, whether she was back at the hotel yet, feeling a stab of panic that she shouldn’t have left her alone.

  “Did you never tell anyone? Not even Daniel?”

  Lily shook her head and looked down at the table, noticing how the grain of the wood rippled across its surface. There had been so many moments when she’d considered confiding in Daniel, but each time the fear of exposing her mum had stopped her. Now Lily wondered whether it had always been there in her marriage, wedged between them, whether any relationship could survive a secret like that.

  Lily thought back to that morning in the school toilets—less than half an hour after watching her mum give Zoe the overdose—grieving for a death she wasn’t yet supposed to know had happened. A death she had been convinced was all her fault. She had not known then that she would spend the next three decades striving for perfection as a means of smothering her guilt. She had not known that she would study with a feverish commitment to get the A-level grades needed for Oxford, or that throughout her three years at university she would make no lasting friendships, allow herself no romantic encounters. She had not known that she would immerse herself in her studies as a distraction from her thoughts, a tactic she would employ for many years to come, professional approbation filling the gaping void where her family should have been. She had presented a picture to the world of a life and a career so unblemished there had been days she had almost managed to believe it herself.

  In lieu of anyone to confide in, Lily had shed the events of that summer like a snake shedding its skin, refashioning herself into someone new, someone good, someone other people aspired to be. It was an impression of her life she had clung to as tightly as if it were a raft in the middle of an ocean. But the fear had always been there, sitting on her shoulder like a vexatious golem: the fear that at any moment the truth might be discovered. Countless times over the years she had imagined her mum confessing, imagined the police interviews, the trial, the prison sentence. So many times she had tried to imagine what she would say if questioned, whether she would confess to her part in it, whether she would acknowledge that she had sown the seed in her mum’s mind. But this was one part of the scenario where her imagination always failed her.

  “I couldn’t. I knew that if I told anyone, I’d be putting Mum at risk. I couldn’t do that to her. I couldn’t do it to any of us.” Lily felt a fissure opening up in her voice.

  “So you’ve been trying to protect Mum all this time? That’s why you didn’t say anything? You just wanted to protect her?”

  Lily was about to nod but a series of memories crept into her head: Zoe and Jess sitting cross-legged on the bottom bunk, painting each other’s fingernails, brushing each other’s hair, whispering into each other’s ears. Zoe and Jess glancing at one another across the dinner table, silent communications indecipherable to all but the two of them. The way her sisters had finished each other’s sentences, how they had laughed at the same jokes and cried at the same books, how they had always known that the other was in distress long before it had been voiced.

  As she glanced across the table to where Jess was awaiting an answer, Lily glimpsed a shadow of the ten-year-old girl who had sat on the edge of the sofa, encased in their mum’s arms, face contorting with grief as she was told of Zoe’s death. She heard the sound of Jess sobbing into her pillow every night after Zoe had died. She remembered coming down to breakfast each morning to the stippling of skin around Jess’s eyes, recalled the months that Jess’s face had seemed permanently mottled with grief. Lily had known what it was to lose a sister and she had always understood it was a bereavement from which she would never recover. But she had not lost a twin. And the incomprehensibility of Jess’s grief made Lily shake her head. “Not just Mum. You, too. Because if you’d known the truth about Zoe’s death, you’d have had to live with it. And you two were so close, I just couldn’t imagine how you’d be able to do that.”

  Lily paused and it seemed to her that this was one of those moments when words were as delicate as eggshells and only the lightest tread ensured they wouldn’t get broken. “But isn’t that what you’ve been doing too, Jess? Isn’t that why you never told Mum what you suspected me of doing? Because you knew it would devastate her. Weren’t you just trying to protect her too?”

  Chapter 65

  Jess

  Jess thought about all those times her belief in Lily’s crime had strained at the leash, urging her toward disclosure. All the times she had dared imagine the relief at unburdening herself. But each time she had been silenced by the same single image: that of her mum’s face crumpling with renewed grief. “Of course it was. I couldn’t have done that to her.”

  Jess blinked and there it was: the image of Lily standing outside the door to the spare bedroom, arm twisted behind her, Jess so certain of the guilt on Lily’s face. As she replayed the scene, watching it afresh, knowing what she now knew, she could see her misreading so clearly: how she had mistaken distress for anger, fear for panic, grief for guilt. And the effect of that replay—watching, frame by frame, the shift in perspective, the change in meaning—was disorienting, bewildering. For the first time Jess recognized the grave simplicity of her error of judgment: one emotion exchanged for another, a story invented to ward off a trauma she was not ready to face. All these years she had supplanted anger for mourning, had punished one sister for still being alive out of grief for the one who was not.

  “I’m sorry, Lily. I really am truly sorry. I know that what I’ve done is unforgivable. I wish you could know how much I hate myself for it. I wish you could know how sorry I am.” She swallowed, the muscles in her throat conspiring against her. Ben’s words echoed in her ears and she raised her head, looked directly at Lily, holding her gaze. “I’m sorry for cutting you off all this time. And I’m sorry for the impact it’s had on you, on Mum, on all of us. I don’t expect you ever to be able to forgive me but if there was any chance we could . . . I don’t know . . . If there was any chance we could just not hate each other . . .” She faltered, words eluding her. She dropped her head, pulling at a loose thread on her blouse, winding it around and around her finger until it dug into her flesh.

  “I’ve never hated you, Jess. Never. I’ve been angry with you. I’ve been bewildered by you. There’ve been times I’ve wanted to scream with frustration at you. But I’ve never hated you. You’re my sister and I love you. I love you even when you’re acting in ways I don’t understand, even when I don’t see you for years. I never stopped loving you.”

  Jess blinked and watched one tear, then another, drop onto the thighs of her jeans. It was only once she’d counted a dozen that she felt able to lift her head and find her voice. “I love you too, Lily. And I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  They reached out and found one another’s hands across the rosewood table, their eyes clouded with tears, and it was as though all the years of separation were slowly dissolving.

  “I’ve got some tissues in my bag. Let me get them out.”

  Jess sniffed loudly as Lily burrowed in her bag and emerged with a packet of tissues, handing one to Jess. “Are you OK?”

  Jess nodded, even though she wasn’t quite sure what it meant anymore. “You?”

  Lily smiled, and it was as if her sister were transforming in front of her: no longer the monster Jess had spent al
most thirty years imagining her to be, but a woman who had spent as long as Jess imprisoned by a secret she had felt compelled to keep for the protection of others.

  “It’s going to be OK, Jess. We can do this, I know we can.”

  Lily smiled at her again, and Jess wanted to reciprocate but there was still so much to be resolved. “What about Mum . . .?”

  “Do you think Mum’s OK . . . ?”

  Their questions collided and they each stopped abruptly, their eyes catching and releasing like a hook-and-eye fastening that couldn’t quite hold.

  “You go ahead. In what way?”

  Jess paused, trying to untangle a knot of feelings, unsure whether she could work her way from the guilt at one end to absolution at the other. “When Zoe died I felt as though a part of me had died too, a part of me I knew I’d never get back. And I haven’t. There’s always been a part of me missing. And now, knowing what Mum did . . . I can’t help feeling it was Mum who stole that part away from me and I don’t know how to forgive her for it.”

  Fresh tears began to fall down Jess’s cheeks and as she wiped them away, Lily began to speak.

  “I know none of us can ever completely understand what it was like for you. I guess only another set of twins could. But however hard it is to accept, Zoe was going to die whatever Mum did. There’s no changing that fact. And however conflicted you are with Mum right now, ask yourself what you’d have done in her position. What would you do if Mia was sick, if she was in that much pain, and you knew she wasn’t going to get better? Are you honestly telling me, as a mother, that you wouldn’t want to do something to put an end to her suffering, however awful that thing was? Because I’d like to think that, if I could find the courage, I’d do the same for Phoebe.”

  Jess tried to imagine how her mum must have felt as she’d sat on Zoe’s bed and given her the overdose. She tried to envisage what must have gone through her mind as she’d filled the syringe, as she’d administered the excess of morphine, as she’d watched her daughter die. She tried to imagine ever having to do that for Mia but her temples throbbed, resisting the image.

  She thought back to that day, walking through the front door, knowing instinctively that Zoe was dead and yet hoping that, if only she could stand still long enough, perhaps she could stop time—reverse it, even—so that the future, when it arrived, might be different.

  “Do you know what I find hardest? I can’t even remember the last thing I said to Zoe. She was my twin sister and I can’t recall my last words to her.” Jess wiped at her tears, aware of having said something she hadn’t been able to acknowledge to herself all these years.

  “I know, Jess. I understand, really I do. But you can’t undo the past. And things with Mum . . . well, they’re different now, aren’t they?”

  Jess thought about her mum wandering alone around Central Park, nursing her disappointment that her longed-for trip to New York had gone so horribly wrong on its first day. She pictured the way her shoulder blades now jutted out from her clothes like stunted wings. She remembered her mum lying under the stiff hospital sheets in the ER less than two months before and how, in the split second after she’d swished back the curtain, the panic Jess had felt was not about seeing Mia and Lily in the same room together but about seeing her mum so frail under the harsh strip lighting.

  Jess allowed herself to imagine how lonely and isolated her mum must have been all this time, knowing that the only person in whom she had ever confided about Zoe’s death had found her confession so intolerable that he hadn’t been able to live with it.

  Pulling at the soggy tissue between her fingers, she knew that a part of her would always wish things could have been different. She would always wish that she had been told about the severity of Zoe’s illness and that she’d known the truth about her death. But most of all Jess wished, very simply, that Zoe had never got ill. And that was a wish, she admitted to herself for the first time, that hadn’t been in anyone’s control: not hers, not her mum’s, not Lily’s or their dad’s. Not the doctors’ or nurses’ who had tried so valiantly to cure Zoe. Jess realized that she had spent all these years being angry with Lily because it was easier to feel anger than it was to feel grief.

  She knew how easy it would be to allow her anger to find a new focus in her mum. But as she glanced toward the entrance and saw her mum standing hesitantly in the doorway, as though unsure whether she was yet ready to cross the threshold, Jess felt something shift inside her: her anger being edged to one side and, in its place, the acute sense of loss she had spent so many years smothering with fury.

  Chapter 66

  Audrey

  Audrey scanned the room until she saw them in the far corner, sitting opposite one another at a round rosewood table. She stood completely still, watching Lily and Jess, wishing she could know what had already been said.

  Hovering in the doorway, she felt all her regrets lining up behind her lips as if determined to take one final collective curtain call before it was too late. She watched her daughters, her breath unmoving in her chest, her lungs clinging to every last drop of air.

  And then she saw it. She saw their hands reach across the table, saw them hold one another for the first time in years. It was a moment of complete stillness in which she felt she was watching their estrangement evaporate, like condensation rising from a frozen, sunlit lake. She caught an unmistakable glance of sympathy pass from Lily to Jess, a look that was received, accepted, reciprocated: such a simple exchange and yet one which made Audrey’s lungs inflate.

  This, Audrey thought, as she watched the tears trickle down Jess’s cheeks, as she saw Lily reach into her bag to hand her sister a tissue, as she watched a conversation resume after decades of unnecessary silence: this was all she wanted. Seeing her daughters together, daring to hope that they might be there for each other once she could no longer be there for either of them. For years it had seemed such an impossible dream. And yet here they were, engaging in something so unremarkable in the grand scheme of things—a conversation between sisters in a bar on a Saturday evening—yet it seemed to Audrey to be one of the most vital, precious things in the world.

  Once upon a time Audrey had believed that her life was set on a clear path and that any diversion led to a complete derailment. Only now did she realize that those moments of change were not an ending but a beginning: a chance for a different kind of life, a different kind of journey, a different form of happiness.

  She thought about the diary upstairs in her hotel room. All those dreams, all those ambitions. Throughout her adult life, she had packaged her desires into tidy little boxes, parceled them up, and stacked them neatly inside her head, never believing that she deserved any of them to come true. Now the only thing she wished was that she had found a little of her eleventh-hour courage sooner.

  Standing in the doorway to the Rose Club in the Plaza Hotel, Audrey realized that nothing she had done over the past few months—not the choir, not the art class, not even the trip to New York—had really been about the fulfillment of those ambitions. They had all been just a framework on which to hang what really mattered: spending time with her family, and finding a way to bring them back together.

  As a waiter stopped by her side and asked if he could be of any assistance, Audrey soaked up the sight of her daughters together and thought how strange it was that of all the things she had wished for on her sixteenth birthday, she had not known to include a moment like this.

  She shook her head, knowing she needed to speak to Lily and Jess but feeling that theirs was a group she had not yet earned the right to join. She wanted to seek their forgiveness but was not yet ready for the possibility of rejection.

  And then, just as she was contemplating going back to her room, rehearsing her apology once more and refining her explanation, giving the girls more time to accustom themselves to their own conversation before she intervened, Jess caught her eye, the two of them locking gazes for what seemed an eternity. She saw Jess turn to Lily, watched he
r say something, saw them both turn back to look at her in unison. She watched, her heart racing, as they stared at her. And then Lily raised a hand and beckoned her over.

  For a moment Audrey’s feet refused to move, as though they weren’t yet ready to trust what her eyes were telling her. But then Lily waved again and Audrey saw on Jess’s face what she thought might have been the most tentative nod in her direction.

  Walking toward them, Audrey tried to remember all the things she wanted to say. As she reached the table, both girls held out their hands to her, and as Audrey took hold of them she felt the first flicker of hope that this might be a new beginning for all of them. Because she was certain now that a person’s story didn’t follow a straight narrative trajectory from birth to death. There were countless beginnings and endings, countless opportunities to start again. There were as many different beginnings to a life as someone was brave and kind enough to allow themselves.

  Part Seven

  November

  Chapter 67

  Jess

  The sound was like water gurgling down a semi-clogged drain.

  Jess sat in the dim light of the bedroom, listening to her mum’s shallow, labored breaths.

  Keep the room dark. Bright light will hurt her head, even behind closed eyes. That was what the nurse had said just over nine hours ago, shortly before Jess had telephoned Lily and suggested she and Phoebe come to Shepherd’s Bush right away.