Seven Lies (ARC)
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I heard her laugh. Her humor was wicked. It still had the power to
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shock me, even when my mind was filled with her thoughts, her wit,
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her traumas.
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I pulled on my dressing gown and secured the belt around my waist.
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It was dark purple and worn, the fibers clumping together along the
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sleeves where something had once been spilled. It had belonged to Jon-
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athan and was far too big for me. The shoulder seams sat inches down
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my upper arms and the hem hung below my knees, almost touching my
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feet. He’d worn it whenever he’d woken early on weekends to prepare
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a cooked breakfast.
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I opened the front door. She was wearing a thick navy jumper and
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loose jeans cropped above her ankles. Her white socks looked like those
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we’d worn in primary school, thick with elasticated bands at the top
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and fabric bobbles along the fringes of white trainers. Her hair had been 18
trimmed, cut short to mirror her jawline, sliding into a pointed chin.
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“About bloody time,” Emma said. “You look like shit.”
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I turned to look at myself in the small round mirror that hung from
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a nail on the wall in the hallway. I hadn’t removed my makeup the night
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before. My eyes were surrounded by smudges of black and my lipstick
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had bled into the folds around my mouth.
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I shrugged. “It was a good night.”
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“Good?” she asked. “Your best friend’s wedding and all you can say
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is good? Is that it?”
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She handed me a brown paper bag filled with pastries. I peered in-
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side: a plain butter croissant, a pain au chocolat.
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“For you,” she said.
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She headed toward the sofa and curled herself into the cushions, her
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feet coiled beneath her, sinking into my furniture, very much at home
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here. I poured myself a glass of orange juice from the fridge.
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“It was great,” I said instead. “A really great night. That better?”
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“Urgh, that’s even worse,” she groaned. “You’re rubbish at this. Tell
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me something interesting. Were there any arguments? Any fights? Who
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got to sleep with the maid of honor?”
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“No one got to sleep with the maid of honor,” I replied. “And no
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fights, as far as I’m aware.”
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“Charles on his best behavior, then?” she asked. “Not too much of
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a cunt?”
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“Not too bad,” I said. “Although there was this one thing right at the
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end of the evening.”
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My flat is surrounded by other flats on all sides but one and is always
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that little bit too warm. So whenever I have guests— which, frankly, isn’t 12
very often— I watch them gradually undress throughout the course of
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their visit. At first, it’s just their coats and sweaters, then it’s their shoes 14
and cardigans, and eventually they are sitting sockless in strap vests.
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Emma was no different. But I was frightened by what I saw that day.
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She lifted her jumper over her head. Her shoulder bones were sit-
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ting high above the flesh of her shoulders. Her collarbones protruded,
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pressing against her skin and stretching it, so that it looked too thin,
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almost translucent. Her upper arms were scrawny, like the wings of a
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bird, all skin and bone and no fat at all.
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I took a sharp breath, a sigh in reverse, and Emma looked up with
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her eyes wide and wary.
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“Don’t,” she said, reading the concern written in the crease at the
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center of my forehead and between my eyebrows. “I’m not interested.”
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“ Em . . .” I said, but then she looked at me, fierce and unblinking,
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and I knew that there was nothing more to say.
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Emma was twelve when she first fell between the gaps in our con-
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centration. I don’t remember the early days of her illness. I was so busy 29
revising, so focused on things that would never matter to me— quadratic
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equations, the formula for respiration, river landscapes— that I failed to S31
recognize the deterioration of the thing that mattered most of all.
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It was July, I think. Emma and I had both finished school for the
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summer— if I remember rightly Marnie was in the South of France—
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and our parents were busy, as ever, hacking away at their marriage with
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pickaxes disguised in insults and eye rolls. It was hot, too hot for En-
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gland, the temperature over eighty- five degrees. We went to the open-
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air pool and I squeezed our towels in between the hundreds of others,
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the families with five children dipping and diving and running dripping
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across the grass, the women with their curves, the older couples sitting
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with their newspapers on folding chairs. I was wearing a swimsuit and
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I was sweating in the sun, moisture trickling between my breasts, drop-
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lets simmering on my top lip. Emma was wearing knee- length shorts
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and a woolen jumper, and she was shivering. I wanted her to go in the
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pool with me, but she wouldn’t: she said something about valuables,
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but we had none, just towels and clothing and one book each. I nagged,
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of course, because I’m an older sister and that is my right, and eventu-
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ally she relented. I remember her easing her jumper over her head, and
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her shoulders and collarbones were so much worse then, desperate to
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escape her body, pushing at her thin, fair skin. She slipped her shorts
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over her thighs and her legs were shapeless, straight lines of bone with
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so little flesh, so little depth. She stared at me, challenging me to re-
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spond to her frail, frightful body, and I said nothing.
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Over the next few months I forced food onto her pla
te and some-
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times she ate it and sometimes she didn’t. And then she was better,
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briefly. And then she was worse again. And the next couple of years
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continued in this pattern, never in the best of health, never in the worst, 26
until I left for university when she was just fourteen. And then there
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were very few peaks and so many troughs. Until eventually even my
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parents could no longer deny the situation sitting there at their dining
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table and she was hospitalized and then released and then eventually
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hospitalized again.
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I know that this casts her as a very particular character in a very
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particular story. But, if you’d met Emma— I wish that you had; you’d
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have liked her, I think— you’d know that she wasn’t that person at all.
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Emma was never a victim. She was sick, yes, and for a very long time,
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but that was such a small part of her narrative.
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Her sickness existed somewhere within her, a strange plague that
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she couldn’t control, there in her mind and in her bones and in the very
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tissue of her being. It was a significant part of her life, but think of it as 06
a path that she didn’t choose, didn’t want, but that she learned to travel 07
in her own way. She eventually chose not to be treated anymore and I
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did my very best to respect that decision.
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“Stop looking at me like that,” she said, curling up on my sofa,
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shielding herself, hiding behind her jumper. “Like you’ve seen a ghost.”
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I raised an eyebrow; I couldn’t help it.
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For years— for almost my entire time at university— I had night-
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mares about Emma’s corpse. I would be dreaming of something else
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when, in the middle of whatever I was envisaging— holidays, lecture
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halls, Marnie— I would discover Emma’s dead body, her limbs stiff and
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blue, eyes clouded and open wide. I would wake gasping for air, sweat-
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ing and shaking in cold, damp sheets.
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“Fuck’s sake,” she said eventually, pulling her jumper back over her
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head. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
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And I had no choice but to let it go. There was nothing to be gained
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in an argument and everything to be lost.
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“Charles,” she said, patting the space beside her on the sofa. “You
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were saying.”
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I sat down and recalled the events of the previous evening. I told her
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about his slurring, the endless bottles of champagne, the relentless top-26
ups. I talked about his arm draped over my shoulder, the coarse fabric
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of his starchy white shirt at the back of my neck. I closed my eyes; I
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knew that I was blushing as I described his palm falling over my breast,
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his fingertips over my nipple. I explained the space that expanded be-
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tween us, the bright white of Marnie’s dress as she approached and her
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beside us and that sense of something being sucked back into its box.
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Emma was wide- eyed, openmouthed. “And what did she say?” Emma
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whispered.
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“Nothing,” I replied. “She didn’t say anything. She didn’t see any-04
thing.”
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“She didn’t see anything at all?” Emma looked down at the cushion
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clutched to her chest.
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“Are you quite sure?” she asked. “Definitely sure? This definitely
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happened exactly like that? He wasn’t just drunk and loose- limbed and
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a little bit handsy without really meaning to be?”
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I shrugged. “Maybe,” I replied.
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“Although it’s not very Charles to be anything other than exactly
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what he means to be really, is it? That’s not really him at all.”
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I smiled. Emma had never met Charles. So the only version of him
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that she knew was mine.
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Here, then, is something that I’ve thought about regularly over the
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last few months. Emma didn’t know Charles. She had no reason to
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doubt my experience, no reason not to believe that he really was a de-
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praved pervert who would grope the maid of honor at his own wedding
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and in front of his beautiful wife. And yet Emma’s instinctive response
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was to question not Charles’s character but my version of events. What
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does that say about me? About my capacity for truth? About my ability
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to accurately read a situation?
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Does it, in fact, suggest that Charles was innocent of all wrongdoing
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that evening? That the error of judgment was mine and mine alone? I
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don’t think so, but it’s worth your consideration. This is my truth, after 26
all. And that is not the same as the truth.
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“Are you going to tell Marnie?” she asked. “That her new husband
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groped you? Because I really think that would be a bad idea.”
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I shook my head.
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“Still creepy, though,” she continued. “Definitely odd.” She rotated
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the cushion in front of her chest, pinching it at the corners, spinning it 32N
like a wheel. “Were you scared?” she asked.
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“Of Charles?”
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“Yeah,” she said. “Like, did it frighten you?”
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“No,” I said, instinctively. “No. Not really.”
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And as soon as I’d said the words, I realized that they weren’t true.
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I had been scared. Not terrified. It wasn’t like that. But unnerved and
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uneasy and suddenly very aware of myself as something much smaller
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stuck in the presence of something much bigger. And it was more than
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the small fear that I often feel in situations that I cannot predict. It was 08
more than the walk home from the tube station late at night and a
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man’s footsteps behind me,
and more than someone standing too close
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at a pedestrian crossing, and more than a group huddled up ahead in
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the tunnel beneath the railway tracks. Because this was calculated. It
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had purpose, an objective— and if it was to make me feel frightened,
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then it had succeeded.
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“How was Mum?” I asked.
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Emma looked down at the floor and fiddled with a strand of wool
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hanging loose from her jumper. “I didn’t go,” she replied. “I just . . . I 17
couldn’t.”
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I exhaled slowly, trying very hard not to sigh. I had explained sev-
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eral times to my mother— I’d even written it on her calendar— that I
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wouldn’t be coming that Saturday, because of the wedding, but that
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Emma would be there instead.
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“Don’t tell me off,” said Emma. “Please don’t. I called. I told the re-
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ceptionist. I just couldn’t do it. Okay? I just couldn’t.”
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When we were younger, still children, my mother and my sister
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were incredibly close. It looked quite disgusting to me, to be fused so
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snugly to somebody else. And yet while Emma sometimes struggled
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with feeling so stifled— and would briefly escape to spend time with
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me elsewhere in the house— she needed my mother in a myriad of
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ways: emotionally, practically, for comfort and company. She was a
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worrier, like my mother, even then, and was uncomfortable and uneasy
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around new people. She hid behind my mother’s legs in strange places,
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peering between her thighs. At home, she followed my mother between
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rooms, wanting to help in the kitchen, with the cleaning, with what-
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ever it was that our mother was doing. In the evenings, she liked to be
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cuddled and read to and bathed. Emma needed my mother and my
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mother needed to be needed.
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But when Emma really needed my mother— when she really needed
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support and love and strength— she received nothing. Her anchor
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slipped away, embarrassed at the very nature of the need. I look back
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now, and I know that my mother was simply frightened. She was never
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idealistic, and she must have known what was happening and how
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