The Good Sister

by Gillian McAllister

  She is earnest. She is so rarely earnest. I meet her eyes and listen.

  “What?”

  “She just wanted you, Martha. She just wanted you.”

  “I know,” I say, my voice thick. “I know. And I wasn’t there.”

  “I was a poor substitute. That’s what I found so hard. I’ve thought about it a lot, lately. I felt so fucking sorry for her. And I’m sorry to say that, Martha. I know you won’t want to hear it. But there it is. That’s why I was angry: I was angry with you. She needed her mum.”

  “I know, Beck. I know she needed me. Not her dad, either, really. But me. You can’t say anything I haven’t thought.”

  “Well, yes.”

  Tears film my eyes. Becky found it difficult because she was sympathetic to Layla. I blink. I hadn’t expected that. She had lied to protect Marc, and she had hidden her true feelings about nannying to protect me. She was proud, yes, but she was also compassionate. My sister. I had forgotten.

  Please let her be good. Please say she didn’t do it. Becky closes her eyes and blinks. “God, I miss her,” she says. “My little niece.” Her voice breaks. “I know I shouldn’t be saying that, sitting here, with you. But I do.”

  “I miss her, too,” I say.

  We’re talking around in circles, ignoring the elephant in the room, and after a moment I can’t stand it anymore.

  “Did you do it, Becky? With him—or by yourself?” I say after several minutes.

  The courtroom fades from my mind, here, in the summer air with my sister. I turn my gaze to her and it is as if she is taking the stand, and this is her evidence.

  She opens her mouth to speak.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t fucking know.”

  My entire body heats up, then cools, like I’ve been plunged into hot and then cold water. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know.

  Guilty, guilty, guilty.

  “You don’t know?” I say, barely able to speak. My vision narrows again, just like it did in A&E when the doctors told me. I can’t see properly. I shake my head.

  “I thought I knew, once. I thought I knew myself, once.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Marc left around nine. We just talked—over the crying—but then I poured another glass of wine and . . .”

  “Why should I believe you, when you’ve said he wasn’t there this entire time? He lied in the witness box,” I say.

  But then I think of the expression on his face outside his house that morning. Of course. He believes her both because he was there, and because—that night, for them—it was love. Reconciliation. That’s their story, anyway.

  “I know,” Becky says, her voice flat. “You don’t have to believe me. Nobody does. I can see why.”

  I look at her features. Her eyes are blurred with tears. I don’t know if I believe her. Why should I? I can still see so clearly a scenario where Marc and Becky covered it up. Perhaps my instincts about him were correct, all this time.

  “What happened after he left?” I say, swallowing my doubts.

  “If you’d have asked me early on—right afterward, before I got charged, or even after I was bailed and the press slept on Mum and Dad’s lawn to try and get an exclusive—I would’ve said I was innocent.”

  My mind seems to spring to life. I knew it. I knew I was right when I was leaving her house. Somebody murdered my baby.

  “But . . .” Becky says. “I was drinking. I drank so bloody much. A bottle of wine.”

  Despite the warm, clammy air, my body chills. This is it. She’s going to say it. All of my hopes, the benefit of the doubt, all my optimism will be dashed, just like that.

  She’s still looking directly at me. That full hair. That face, my sister’s face. What expressions haven’t I seen on it? Hardly any. I have seen that upper lip curve in a sneer of disdain, the mischief when she cracks a naughty joke, the stress that appeared around her eyes while in that bloody job that led us to this. But now her emotions are stripped away. Her expression is blank as she looks at me.

  “Lately, I’ve been starting to think . . .”

  “What?”

  “I don’t even know what happened myself. How could I? I was so drunk.”

  “Yes.”

  “I spoke to my lawyer. I said maybe, with the wine and everything, maybe I was a little . . . that maybe I held her too close,” she whispers.

  “Too close, too close,” I say, my hands clasping together like fighting snakes. “Too close.”

  “It must have been me. Everyone says it.”

  “Close how?”

  She shakes her head. “We were in the bedroom. I was on my way to bed. Pissed. I was frustrated with her. I held her to me. I must have obstructed her airway—it must have been me.”

  “But did you? Was it you?”

  “I was angry.”

  “I was angry at Layla a lot, too. What did you do, Beck?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t know. My lawyer has told me not to say. She says I didn’t hold her too close. That it couldn’t have been me. That I have made it up, subsequently, to explain it.”

  The language she’s using isn’t quite right, isn’t quite normal, to my ears. It’s not like she is remembering something, but rather, misremembering.

  “She cried afterward, anyway, I thought. I could’ve sworn she was crying around eleven, off and on, but I can’t remember anymore. And fucking Alison says Layla wasn’t crying at midnight. And the experts say she was dead by then. So what do I know? I was trashed. Trolleyed.”

  “When did you hold her too close, Becky? I’d rather know, before tomorrow. Before the end.”

  “I must have held her too close.”

  “Are you going to tell the court that?”

  She brings her lips close together, clamps them so they blanch, then shakes her head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not telling the court anything. My lawyer said not to. I wanted to, Marth,” she says, looking at me, her eyes damp. “I wanted to get up there and tell everybody the truth. The messy truth.”

  “But what is the truth?”

  “Six months ago I would’ve wanted to take the stand and tell everybody it wasn’t me,” she says.

  “But now . . .”

  “The truth now is that I don’t know. I’ve always said it wasn’t me, but recently I’ve started to think it must have been. I was drunk, and holding her close. That’s what must have happened.”

  “But why?” I say.

  The marram grass shifts around us in the breeze. “Because it must have. Imagine this,” she says, and I see some of her old flair return. “Imagine this.”

  “What?”

  “You’re driving along, at the speed limit, you’d say, or thereabouts. Thirty.”

  “Right.”

  “You hit a child and they die.”

  I swallow. “Yeah.”

  “And ten experts say your car’s skid marks, they indicate you were doing fifty.”

  “Right.”

  “The injuries say fifty, too. The state of the vehicle. Fifty. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you think: Well, I can’t actually remember looking at the speedometer. It was just a belief you had. That you were doing thirty. It’s not based on anything. It’s formless. And, in the face of all this evidence, it disappears. It just disappears. Replaced by doubt. And doubt can be huge.”

  “I see.”

  “So I would’ve said six months ago that this never happened, but, Marth, there’s been a campaign against me. Constant witness statements on retinal hemorrhages and bleeding lungs and my overheard shouts. And do you know what? I think: Just hand me over. I obviously didn’t know what I was doing. I’m not of sound mind, I can’t remember! So just deliver me up to the j
ustice system. Okay, I was doing fifty. Because I don’t fucking know.”

  “But if you had to say which one was the truth—which is it, Beck? Thirty or fifty? If you had to bet your life on it. Experts aside. What’s your evidence?”

  “Thirty,” she whispers. “I never speed.”

  We don’t speak for a few minutes. What’s to say?

  We shift closer to one another. We watch the iron-gray sea together.

  “I just wanted to know if you did it,” I say to her.

  A fine mist is rising from the sea and spreading inland.

  I don’t remember this from our childhood.

  “It’s not that simple,” she says.

  It’s another fiction. Because what could be more simple than this question?

  “What time did you hold her too close?” I say.

  “Around nine thirty?” she says hesitantly.

  The latest time of death.

  The fingers of my left hand twitch and curl in, involuntarily. It goes against my gut instinct, and believing in Becky’s innocent intentions, to feel this twitch of anger, but I feel it anyway. It was her. It was probably her.

  The world turns dark, a mess of smothered babies and blood and gore and fear and . . .

  Oh, the fear Layla must’ve felt.

  61

  Martha

  I leave Becky there, eventually, but I go back to her house. I know now that there is nothing here, no concrete evidence, just insubstantial memories, like the sea mists I have left swirling around Becky.

  It’s time to put it behind us. To say good-bye.

  The house stands empty. Tall and slim and dark. I text Scott, telling him where I am, and he calls me immediately.

  “Why?” he says when I answer.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I just . . . it’s almost over and I just, I guess I wanted to be here. Where she was last. Maybe Becky will move back in again, after . . .”

  Scott sighs softly down the line, but doesn’t correct me, doesn’t feel the need to say: Of course she won’t; she’ll be in prison.

  “I just wanted to be here,” I say.

  Not to figure it out, not now. Just to be here. To accept it. The messy truth. And to bid farewell.

  “I see,” he says. He pauses. “Do you want me to come over?”

  “No,” I say quietly. “No. It’s fine.”

  “Are you going to stay there?”

  “I think so,” I say.

  I can’t explain it to myself, so I don’t try to explain it to him. I just feel as though I might figure it out if I stay here.

  A full night.

  “Do you mind?”

  “No. Do what you need to,” he says simply, and we hang up.

  The door is soundless as I slide my key in the lock and open it. The house sits silently, like a sleeping animal, and I close the front door behind me for the first time.

  I’ll just explore a bit. Wait it out. Sleep here, the night before we find out what truly happened.

  The living room is a time capsule of what happened that night. Xander wasn’t taken from Becky until the postmortem results came in, but once the spare bedroom was declared a crime scene, and Layla dead, they left. That morning. They never came home again.

  I pick my way across the living room. Becky’s mess surrounds me. She was always so chaotic.

  The walls are a slate gray, with accents of white: a white fluffy throw, a white rug. White candles in bell jars. Becky is a natural. She should have stuck out design school, somehow. Or gone back, maybe. But she’d been subsumed by motherhood, and then defined by her own failure, too bitter to change it.

  A collage of black-and-white photographs adorns the wall behind the sofa. Layla is one of them. Framed and hung during her short eight-week life. It is the same photograph I had framed.

  My body remembers the way upstairs, even though it has been almost a year since I walked up these steps. A left turn, halfway up the stairs, that I make instinctively. A fine layer of dust has settled on the banister and I wipe a finger through it.

  Becky’s room is at the front of the house, and I walk in and stare at her bed. That, too, is a freeze-frame. Her duvet pulled back, half of the bed bare, as she must have rushed frantically from the room. A hair dryer is discarded, plugged in, switched off, lying on the floor next to her pine wardrobe. A wineglass is by her bed.

  I shake my head, leave the room, and head up the second flight of stairs to Xander’s room. I can’t go into the spare room, the nursery. Not yet. I’ll start slowly.

  Xander’s room has a raised step, where the doorframe protrudes upward, and I almost trip on it. I’ve hardly ever been in here—only a handful of times. When was I last here? I can barely remember: Our family’s shared past is a speck on the horizon these days.

  Xander used to walk alongside me, sometimes, when we were all out together. He seemed to like to chat to me, though he pretended he didn’t. What would we talk about? School. Sports. Television. How much he wanted a dog. It was a lifelong dream of his; I admired his dedication to it. Marc had said when he was ten he could get one if he walked a lead every day for a year, to prove his commitment. “A lead?” I had said, in disbelief. “How bizarre.”

  “He has to come home from school to get the lead. He can’t just walk around at lunchtime at school and count that,” Marc had said.

  There was a beauty to it. Xander was going to log the walks on Becky’s Fitbit. There’ll be no chance now everything is suspended. Family life as they knew it ended last year. Hope and dreams are hanging, waiting.

  His bedroom is entirely blue. Navy walls, royal-blue double bed. The only thing not blue is his enormous Xbox One setup. Gaming paraphernalia lies everywhere.

  I sit on the bed. It still smells of him. A musty glass of water sits by the side of the bed. I wonder if he’s sipped it since.

  Xander and I played Tomb Raider just two years ago, on Boxing Day. I came up to say hi to him, but ended up staying for hours in his room. I couldn’t move along a snowy pathway in the game. I kept falling off, flailing with an ice pick. How we both laughed at me. In the end, he took the controller from me and ran easily along the ledge, then passed it back. We ate an entire box of Cadbury Roses during that cold Boxing Day.

  Curious, I boot up his Xbox. What was he last doing? God, he loved his games.

  Xander2000. That’s what he called himself, and that’s what it says in green at the top right of the screen.

  He’d been playing a game called Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.

  Xander2000: Last saved: 10/27.

  Weren’t we all?

  Last seen then. Last saved then. Before.

  * * *

  —

  The nursery is darker than I remember. The curtains are motionless at the window. I reach to touch the glass. It’s cool against my fingertips. The Moses basket is gone, examined by the police, and then given back to us, and so the room is almost empty, only a makeshift changing table there, a foam mattress lying atop a chest of drawers. Becky’s things are piled into a corner, away from where Layla would have slept. An empty picture frame. Trivial Pursuit and a sack of Xander’s old clothes that I was going to go through for Layla.

  I sink down onto the floor by the changing table and allow myself a fantasy. I hardly ever indulge.

  Layla is here. She will be one soon—in two weeks. I’m stressing over a cake. Becky is sardonic—“She won’t even remember it”—but helps me ice it anyway, the buttercream forming peaks that mimic Layla’s spiked-up blond baby hair. I hold her out, cast in the dim light of a single candle, and try to encourage her to blow it out, which she doesn’t.

  Xander pushes his fringe back from his forehead and reaches for her, his cousin, and he holds her as Becky and I sit and watch.

  I close my eyes, thinking . . .

 
When I open them, the room is just the same. Bare. It holds no clues. Nothing in the house does, of course not. What did I expect? That I would find something the police missed? Solve the case myself, right before the last day of the trial, when it’s solved already?

  It was Becky. She got drunk and held my baby too close. That’s all. That’s it. A tragedy.

  No. There’s no evidence left, of course. I don’t know what I expected to find. There is nothing here. No evidence.

  Just a space, where my baby once lay.

  A hole.

  62

  Judge Christopher Matthews, QC

  Sadie doesn’t want to know.

  It has taken him until now to stop reliving the email, the bubble of hope that sat in his chest as he opened it, which popped violently as he read her curt response, poisonous pessimism spreading throughout his body.

  Thanks for the apology, though. I do actually—strangely—appreciate it, she wrote.

  Strangely. Strangely. Because she no longer cares, he guesses, is the context.

  He is a lawyer, after all. He can do linguistic semantics. They may have a verdict tomorrow. He will distract himself with that. It seems like a slam dunk for the prosecution, to be honest. Nevertheless, the decision will be monumental. The jury must always consider it seriously, no matter how strong the prosecution’s case.

  “Anyway,” he says to Rumpole. “She doesn’t want me back, old lad. But at least I realize. How I’ve been.”

  Rumpole regards him seriously, then goes back to sleep.

  Christopher pads upstairs later. He doesn’t sleep well the day before the case closes for deliberations. That feeling of goose bumps settles over him again, just as he is about to fall asleep, and keeps him up for several hours.

  tuesday

  63

  Martha

  I wake in Becky’s house on the last day of the trial and I know, somehow, that this will resolve itself today.