The Good Sister

by Gillian McAllister

  Will nobody here just say what they’re actually thinking? I think of the reflux appointment in full, now, without the distraction of the cross-examination playing out in front of me. Layla wasn’t crying as badly as she often was. Isn’t that always the way? And so I was over the top, with Irene—“She’s normally much worse than this!”—but Layla wasn’t exactly happy, either, looking back. She was giving a low murmur, a kind of cat’s growl, when Irene examined her, her feet kicking in her footed pajamas. Images walk onto the stage in my mind, unbidden. Layla’s tiny feet, soft after a bath; they would fit into the palm of my hand like lucky rabbit’s feet. Those feet, those sounds: all gone. I swallow.

  Ethan pours my tea for me. It’s fresh, and a tea leaf makes its way into my cup, floating for a second on the top, glossy black, before being doused away by the milk he adds second.

  “Badly,” I answer eventually.

  Mum takes a bite out of a toastie. Beyond her, the sea is moving steadily. The movement of it makes me feel drunk.

  “It’s unfair they’re talking so much about Layla’s crying,” she says. “It’s irrelevant.”

  “God, Mum—it’s obvious why,” Ethan says.

  I wonder when he became so snappy. He didn’t use to be like this. He broke his leg when he was fifteen, and I spent the whole summer inside with him, watching Friends DVDs. We are word-perfect on the early seasons, can recite them at length. One recent Christmas, we moved the sofa to fit the tree in and both shouted, “Pivot!” at the same moment.

  He picks up the spoon and stirs my tea for me, even though I don’t take sugar, as if I were an infant who needed caring for.

  “It’s to make it look like Becky lost control. Because of the crying,” I say to Mum, who looks baffled. As I say it, her expression closes down.

  I stare at the sea and a memory comes back to me. Becky and me as teenagers, sneaking off one Saturday to the Brighton naturist beach. Becky was so excited the day we decided to go, telling Mum and Dad we were going to the Lanes. Finally, we arrived, our feet sore in flip-flops in the heat. There were naked people for miles. I felt my cheeks heat up.

  “I can’t believe it’s pebbled,” was all Becky said as we reached the sign and stopped, gawping.

  “Why?” I said.

  She arched an eyebrow and shot me a sidelong look. “All the beaches are pebbled around here,” I reminded her.

  “Martha.”

  “What?”

  “Pebbles. Hardly comfortable on a bare arse-cheek or two,” she said. “Or, indeed, a bollock.”

  “Becky,” I said, but her humor was infectious, always was.

  “Jesus, look at them.”

  “There’s . . . so many of them,” I said faintly.

  “I have never seen quite so many dicks in my whole life,” she said. With that, she took off her top and skirt and ran into the sea. Just like that, right in her underwear, just a teenager herself. She never thought. She was so impulsive. I’d been both in awe and frightened of her. She didn’t care. She just didn’t care. It was that self-destructive streak again. Only the moment seemed to matter to her. Not afterward, when her clothes clung to her wet skin, when she was shivering on the way home. Everybody had seen her body: her teenaged body.

  Later, when we got back, we didn’t tell anybody where we’d been, not even Ethan, who was sort of our ally. Becky had wet hair, but nobody seemed to notice.

  I blink, now, looking at Ethan, who’s gazing intently at me.

  I know he’s going to ask it before he does. I can see it in the way he moves the wooden tray.

  “Do you think they’re going to vote guilty?” he says. The words fire into me like bullets. How could he ask so casually?

  “I don’t know,” I say tightly. “Ask them.”

  It’s what I tell myself every day. Trust the justice system, and we will know for sure next week, after it has performed its excavation, its deep, focused mining of that night in October last year.

  “I think the prosecution case is strong,” he says. His tone is resigned. “I’m worried it looks convincing.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this . . .”

  “Let’s not,” Mum says.

  “She is adamant,” Ethan says. After he has said it, he stares at me again. He’s got Becky’s jawline. It looks clenched, sometimes, even when it isn’t. He has said it before. I thought he would be cynical, but he isn’t. He is almost as staunch as Marc about her innocence. “I’ve never seen her so adamant,” he says now, again.

  “The evidence is quite clear,” Scott suddenly says tightly.

  “Oh, is it? Let’s just do away with trials, then,” Ethan says. “Lock her up and throw away the key.”

  “That’s not what . . .”

  Mum is staring down at the table. Her shoulders are tensed. They start to shake. It is almost imperceptible, but I see it. She is suppressing tears.

  “This is why I don’t want to discuss it,” I say. “This always happens.” And it has: Over and over and over again last winter, we picked it apart and it always blew up.

  Ethan protesting her innocence.

  Scott arguing for her guilt.

  And me, Mum, and Dad, not knowing, just not knowing, our shoulders shaking.

  “This always happens,” I add.

  “Forget it,” Ethan says bitterly.

  We cannot possibly make up our minds. Becky swears she didn’t do it, but all of the evidence points to her. We are in limbo. My parents live with her. They still—presumably—eat meals together and take walks and talk about the weather. Their judgment is suspended, too, has been for almost a year now.

  “I don’t know,” I say, my voice rising several octaves. “I don’t know.”

  Ethan is silent for a few seconds. Behind him is an entire wall of clocks. They tick out of sync with each other.

  “Nobody knows,” I say. “Clearly. How many professionals are involved in finding out?”

  “Loads,” Ethan says quietly, his mouth drawn tight. He pushes his plate of unfinished food away.

  I suddenly feel deflated, guilty. He struggled to get this week off. Emails answered, calls returned quietly in side rooms. He doesn’t need to be here with me, watching a trial, eating awkward lunches, but he is.

  “She knows,” I say. “But that’s it.” I shrug.

  “I feel like I know,” he says. “I know Becky.”

  Mum darts a look at me, and I see her eyes are wet.

  How must this be for her? Her two daughters: at war.

  Unwillingly.

  “You know Becky,” Ethan says.

  Mum flags a waitress down and mimes for the bill.

  “I didn’t know either of them,” I say, the punch line open to me like a swinging door.

  But the words I say aren’t true. I thought I might not know Layla when I sat looking at her for the first time in the hospital, feeling unable to understand how I was now somebody’s mum, that my daughter was there in front of me. But I did. I knew what her cries meant and when her tiny hands were about to tighten around my fingers. It was as if somebody blurred the edges, just slightly, so that she and I continued to overlap.

  And I knew Becky. I knew before she told me that she was separating from Marc. I knew from the way she held her shoulders when she was desperate to interject with an anecdote of her own at parties, and I knew when it would be to tell the story of the time I was so nervous about my SAT results that I wet myself.

  But did I know my sister and my daughter now? Did I know them together? No. I was too busy being busy, being absent.

  “I really don’t know,” I say, my eyes feeling watery. “Do you?”

  “I know when she’s lying, and I don’t think she is,” he says.

  I tilt my head, looking at him. He never understood Becky like I did, at least I didn’t think so. He w
as sometimes dismissive of her, in adulthood, referring to her whims and, occasionally, unfairly, her status as a single parent. His life was so orderly. The big legal job. His wife. Children in their near future, I thought. But he didn’t engage, would avoid even the most banal questions—“How are you?” I would ask, and he’d wave a hand and say, “Same old.” He could have no idea whether Becky had done it, because he didn’t know what Becky was about. Not like I did.

  I can picture her innocence completely. Becky, frantically calling 999. Becky, who was hugely unlucky—wasn’t she always so unlucky?—all the evidence pointing to the aunt in the postmortem results. Becky facing trial alone, without the full support of her cold sister, Martha, who merely watched from the public gallery, undecided.

  But I can see her guilt, too. That temper. That attitude she sometimes seemed to have. The self-destruct button. Consequences be damned.

  But what if there’s something else? Something beyond the unknown asphyxiation accident the defense alleges? What if it was an accident that she’s covered up, in that hasty, messy way of hers? What if she’s got in too deep?

  There was an entire evening on the night of October 26. An entire evening during which anything could have happened. What if somebody else was there that evening? What if it had been them?

  17

  Martha

  My eyes don’t adjust readily to the dark of the courtroom foyer—it is that bluish darkness that follows sunshine—and I can hardly see as I am scanned and frisked and my handbag is opened for the fourth time in two days.

  And then, as I take a blinded step forward, there is Becky. So real and so tall and so near to me that I can smell her perfume.

  I can feel Ethan next to me. Becky is in front of us. And here we are. The three of us. Two sisters and a brother, just as we have been for decades before this. Becky has Ethan’s green eyes. Becky and I have the same nose. We all have the same faces that look serious at rest.

  I brush past her, not acknowledging her.

  I can’t.

  * * *

  —

  In the courtroom, the jury files back in, and Ellen stands up for the prosecution.

  “An agreed statement will now be read out,” she says, slightly pompously.

  An agreed statement? I look sideways at Scott. He shrugs. Just beyond him, I see Ethan’s brow has lowered. He is scribbling on a blue legal pad, which he passes to me. Has Becky got a conviction?? he has written.

  I almost scoff, silently, here in the public gallery.

  No, I write back.

  Ellen stands up and begins to read.

  “It is agreed that on the twenty-eighth day of April 2015 the defendant Rebecca Blackwater was convicted at Brighton Magistrates’ Court of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior, contrary to section 4A of the Public Order Act 1986 and fined the sum of three hundred and fifty pounds.”

  The judge clears his throat and begins to speak.

  “The defendant’s previous conviction is something that you may take into account and weigh in the balance. But you must not convict her on the evidence of that alone or mainly on that evidence. If you give it any weight, how much weight you give to it is a matter for you. The Crown says that it supports their case because it demonstrates that the defendant has a propensity to lose control and commit acts of violence. The defense, on the other hand, submits that you should not give it any weight because it is a crime unrelated to the offense of which the defendant is accused. You can take it into account only if you consider it to be fair to do so.”

  I am staring hard at Ethan. He looks over at me and shrugs.

  What does it mean? I write on the back of a receipt to him. Ethan writes back to me. He passes the note to Scott, who holds it out for me between his index and third fingers.

  It’s road rage, he has written.

  He gestures for the note back, a flick of his fingers. It returns with more writing on it.

  It’s damaging because it raises the question: What might Becky be capable of?

  * * *

  —

  The parties say no more about the road rage. It is introduced, and left hanging, for the jury to decide upon. A secret from Becky’s past, unearthed, and shown to us, and then put away again.

  Road rage. I had no idea. When did she . . . What possessed her to . . . Had she attended a hearing, and told none of us? How could she? I try to remember April 2015, but I can’t. I can’t find the day. It must have just been a normal day, for me.

  Road rage. Shouting at somebody in the street. My body chills with the shock of it. Jesus, what else was she capable of?

  Most of the time, with Becky, I can relate. Sure, she is impulsive. Sometimes she is temperamental, dramatic. But then sometimes, other times, she does things like this. Running into the sea with no regard for who was looking. Riding her bicycle into a car. Raging at another driver so seriously that she got convicted. Who is she?

  No, I tell myself. She’s Becky. This is just the justice system, shining a light on the worst parts of her personality. I never doubted her before all of this. I never thought she was capable of anything truly bad. I was never frightened of her. Never.

  “The prosecution calls Jasbinder Kaur to the stand,” Ellen says. “Jasbinder is the defendant’s neighbor, and overheard a phone call on the night in question.”

  A woman with long, shiny hair is let in by the usher and takes her place at the stand. Her large eyes dart around the courtroom, from the crest behind the judge to the jury to Becky in the dock.

  I stare at her. Yes. That’s who it is. It’s Becky’s neighbor, at the back. She’s a particular sort of young woman—fastidious about order and bin night—but that’s all I know of her.

  “And what happened on the night of the twenty-sixth of October?”

  “I overheard a phone call.”

  “Made by whom?”

  “The defendant.”

  Goose bumps appear on my arms. The night of.

  Until now, the witnesses have all been peripheral, like planets orbiting the sun, relevant but far removed from the event. These next witnesses: They were all there on that night.

  The neighbors.

  The paramedic.

  The doctors who couldn’t help her in time.

  The police.

  The case is closing, rushing toward its devastating conclusion, and I can’t stand it.

  18

  Jasbinder Kaur

  7:30 p.m., Thursday, October 26

  Eventually, the weeds got the better of her, as they always did. She couldn’t resist cleaning and tidying, these days. Since the miscarriage, anyway. The mess of it.

  Kev said it was getting worse, the cleaning, but she thought the house looked brilliant. Sometimes, she would sprint up the stairs, trying not to look at the carpet in case she saw crumbs, and not bothering to brush her teeth in case she spotted the beginnings of black mold again in the bathroom.

  The security light clicked on as she knelt down on the ground, legs tucked underneath her. The night was silent. That’s what she liked about Hove. Six houses overlooked her garden, but there wasn’t a sound from any of them. All she could hear was the spraying of the weed killer and the sloshing of the liquid. Spray, slosh. It was just like vacuuming or ironing: strangely satisfying. She squirted again, thinking of the weeds withering overnight.

  A patio door slid back, in the garden in front of her.

  “Yeah, she just won’t stop,” a voice said.

  Becky, she thought it was. It was coming from the right direction. She carefully set the spray bottle on the ground, then sat back slightly, listening. It was nice to forget the cleaning for a moment. She closed her eyes. It was okay if she didn’t do it. She didn’t have to do it. If only that was true. How sweet life would be if it were.

  “No,” Becky’s voice said, su
rprisingly loud in the clear night. “She’s not hungry. Definitely not.”

  Jasbinder reached a hand out and twirled the stem of a dandelion between her fingers. It was rough, like fine Velcro, sticking against the broken skin on her hands. She had always liked Becky. She was very real. Jasbinder often went to confide in people—to tell them about the miscarriage, to tell them about the cleaning—but always stopped herself. But Becky knew. She had told Jasbinder about her inability to conceive. They’d talked about how hard it was, together.

  “Inside,” Becky said. “I’m in the garden. Having a break.” Jasbinder strained to hear. Yes, she could hear a baby’s cry, coming from inside. Who was that? Becky didn’t have a baby. She must be babysitting. Jasbinder felt her innards twist. The snug, warm weight of a baby. The tiny fat hands, gripping her thumb. Maybe she could go and visit.

  Pop over. Just to—to hold it, to smell it.

  “No. God, no need for that,” Becky said.

  Jasbinder could hear Becky’s feet on the pavement as she paced. Was somebody offering to come over? Jasbinder thought that would be best: Babies were hard work on your own.

  She held a tall weed in one hand as she squirted it with the other. As she looked at it, she thought perhaps it was actually quite beautiful: thick, ragged leaves, rough like goosefleshed skin. Little purple flowers in the center. It suddenly pained her to do it, but she squirted it anyway: Weed, be gone.

  “Don’t,” Becky said. “But will you be there? I don’t know. Just be on the end of a phone.” There was a long pause. “No. I know. Don’t be silly. Of course I won’t.”

  Becky hung up shortly after that, and Jasbinder heard the patio door slide slowly shut behind her.

  19

  Martha

  No need for that. That’s what Jasbinder said Becky had said. No need for what? To come over? I sit back in the public gallery, my thoughts racing. What if he had come over? What if she had lied?