26
But I did begin to feel afraid. I knew in that moment that something
27
bad had happened.
28
I went back downstairs and found the security guard. He’d been
29
hired to patrol the area after a young man had been stabbed in the
30
nearby car park. He was perched on a low brick wall and I interrupted
S31
the film he was watching indiscreetly on his phone to ask for help. He
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
sighed loudly and said that there was nothing he could do, that I needed
02
to come back with the police.
03
I called them immediately and spoke loudly, explaining that my
04
sister was vulnerable, hospitalized only a few months earlier, virtually
05
housebound, and that I couldn’t get through to her at all. I stood there
06
in front of the security guard, pacing, interrupting him further, while
07
waiting for the police to arrive.
08
I felt sort of ridiculous, because while I was absolutely sure that
09
something was terribly wrong, I couldn’t shake the fear— the hope,
10
too— that I was unnecessarily making a fuss.
11
The police arrived and I think that they knew, too, that she was dead.
12
At their insistence, the security guard contacted the maintenance
13
man, who accompanied us up to the flat.
14
“You want to wait here?” asked the policewoman. “We can go in first.”
15
I shook my head. “It’s fine,” I said. “I want to be there.”
16
I knew that my little floret of hope was wrong, that she was dead,
17
and I didn’t want to be a coward this time, to look away because I was
18
afraid.
19
They opened the door and I stepped inside and then I smelled it,
20
and I walked in and she was lying on the sofa, swollen thicker than
21
she’d ever been before, her skin mottled and gray, her eyes wide open,
22
flies swarming and one sitting just above her eyelid.
23
I stood and stared, and the policewoman rushed past me to feel for
24
a pulse but we all knew then that there wasn’t one. The maintenance
25
man retched behind me and I heard him rush back onto the balcony.
26
I had known for years that she was going to die.
27
That sounds morbid, and perhaps it is, but she was terminally ill.
28
She had a disease from which she would never recover. There was only
29
one outcome.
30
The policewoman stood up and shook her head and then walked
31S
toward me and put her arm around my waist and turned me around
32N
and led me back toward the staircase.
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I wasn’t afraid. I knew what to expect. I had experienced grief and I
01
was ready.
02
“Is there anyone I can call for you?” she asked me.
03
This time there was no one at all.
04
05
06
Here are some of the things that you have when you have others,
07
things that I no longer have: the steady, reassuring, harmonious hum of
08
someone somewhere who cares; the reflex that reaches toward the
09
story, the retelling, when something goes laughably wrong; the some-
10
one you’d call from the side of the road, the hospital, the back of a po-
11
lice car; the knowledge that you’ll never lie dead in your bed unfound
12
for long because someone somewhere is searching.
13
What is it to live without these things? Without love and laughter
14
and friendship and hope?
15
I don’t want to know.
16
I don’t want to live that life.
17
I’m making a choice— that sounds bold; it feels bold— to recapture
18
those things, whatever it takes, to make this life something worth living.
19
I won’t live like this anymore.
20
Which means that things are going to have to change.
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
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01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
The
10
11
Seventh Lie
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
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01
02
03
04
Chapter Thirty- Nine
05
k
06
07
08
09
10
E
11
mma died a week ago.
12
That’s not very long, is it?
13
I’m still in shock. I must be.
14
And yet, at the same time, I think that I’ve already reached that
15
theoretical final stage of grief. I know that she has gone; I can accept
16
that she has gone.
17
I had always known, I suppose, that she would never grow old. I
18
never assumed that she would become one of those ghoulish women
19
with crepe paper skin lying on a hospital gurney. It just never felt likely.
20
Perhaps because she was already, in so many ways, like those old women
21
tucked down hospital corridors.
22
She spent so much
time alone. I had never before seen her as weak
23
as she’d been in these last few weeks. Her bones seemed so frail. Her
24
back ached and her knuckles were swollen and arthritic. She struggled
25
to climb the stairs to her flat. It was her hips, she said. She suffered
26
from such a complex menagerie of ailments that most of her adult life
27
was spent balancing precariously at the boundary between life and
28
death.
29
And so I had known for a very long time that this was coming. I
30
could see it there in the stars every night, shining the truth, a moment
S31
waiting to be decreed. It is not the worst way to lose a loved one.
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
Those deaths that appear unexpectedly— the bolts of light against a
02
dark night sky— are far worse. You glance out the window and suddenly
03
it’s there in front of you, brighter than any of the other stars and falling 04
fast. There’s no time to prepare or to ground yourself before the earth
05
shifts beneath your feet.
06
Those are the deaths that you cannot accept. They are the fiercest
07
and they land the hardest, destroying other lives and other futures and
08
trailing devastation. Because you feel it all at once, in just one moment, 09
as a life glides through the cracks in the earth like liquid through
10
clasped fingers.
11
I returned home immediately after discovering her. I cried, but only
12
a little. And then I fell asleep.
13
I woke up early— too early— and I felt horribly imbalanced, as
14
though all the pieces that had made up my life before that moment had
15
shifted position overnight. I pulled on my jeans and a jumper and went
16
out into the street to remind myself that the trees were not shaking and
17
that their roots weren’t quivering underground and that the pavement
18
wasn’t being slowly peeled away from the surface of the earth. I wanted
19
to remind myself that this was not the worst, that I had already sur-
20
vived far worse.
21
I saw that the sky was black, lit only by the moon shining overhead
22
and the sharp, warm glow of streetlamps. I marched through the city,
23
into the small squares of suburb hidden within. Parked cars were lined
24
up along the curb, their wheels snug against the lip of the sidewalk. I
25
walked past the curry house with its neon sign sparking fiercely against
26
the night, the supermarket, its door chained closed and a single flores-
27
cent bulb flickering within. I passed two real estate agents, three hair-
28
dressers, and saw that the city was unchanged.
29
I returned to my flat and I saw flecks of dust floating in my bedroom
30
and in the kitchen and I started to clean. Because life doesn’t recognize 31S
small, individual losses. The dust still gathers. I had a shower and put on 32N
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29 7
the bathroom and to refill my wineglass and to make a few slices of
01
toast. I told myself to be patient, to persevere, that this, too, would pass.
02
03
04
The following evening, I dragged a dining chair into my bedroom and 05
stood it against my open wardrobe and clambered up, looking for the
06
old photograph albums created by my mother decades earlier, when we
07
were still a family. I found them there: thick and dusty and bound in
08
red leather.
09
I sat on my bed and leafed through the pages, trying to find photo-
10
graphs of Emma and me together. There were dozens. There was one of
11
me in denim dungarees and pink sandals nestled into the corner of an
12
armchair, holding her in my arms and across my thighs. She must have
13
been only a few weeks old, because there were still tubes bent into her
14
nose and curled across her cheeks.
15
One was taken against a brick wall, the two of us hand in hand in
16
matching school uniforms. She was standing beside me, her head at my
17
chest. There was a lovely one of us sitting in a field, sausage rolls and 18
sandwiches and biscuits laid out between us on a tartan blanket, a Fris-
19
bee in her fist, and cows standing sturdy in the background. There was
20
one of us in matching orange swimsuits at a waterpark with monstrous
21
slides twisting behind us. Then, her little body was a miniature replica
22
of mine: the same straight thighs, the same square shoulders. There
23
were two festive photographs toward the back of the album. In the first
24
we were sitting side by side in our pajamas, presents piled around us in
25
colored paper, the tree glittering behind us, and these bright, excited
26
grins on our faces. In the second we were in matching duffel coats and
27
Wellington boots beside a snowman with a carrot for a nose and twigs
28
for arms. And, at the very end of the last album, one of us in front of
29
our final family home, on the day we moved in, standing between our
30
parents.
S31
I knew that I needed to tell my mother.
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
It was a Wednesday. I had never visited her on a Wednesday before,
02
but I knew that I shouldn’t wait until Saturday. I went to the station and 03
I boarded the train, and I saw my own face in the window and that my
04
eyes were red and swollen and my skin puffy and gray. I rubbed at my
05
cheeks to revive them. I tried not to cry on the journey in the hope that 06
they might look a little better by the time I arrived.
07
I pressed the buzzer at the desk, and the receptionist approached
08
me and sighed loudly when I said that I needed to speak to my mother
09
and that it wa
s an urgent matter.
10
“We weren’t expecting you today,” she said.
11
“As I said,” I repeated, “it’s urgent.”
12
“She might be in the dayroom— ”
13
“She won’t be.”
14
“We have allocated visiting hours . . .”
15
She trailed off as I turned and walked down the corridor toward my
16
mother’s room.
17
She didn’t seem surprised to see me. She smiled as I sat down at the
18
end of her bed; she probably thought it was the weekend. She was wear-
19
ing that blue cardigan again, the sleeves rolled up around her elbows,
20
and it seemed as though she still had her pajamas on underneath.
21
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
22
She nodded.
23
“It’s not good news,” I said.
24
She nodded again.
25
“Mum,” I said, “it’s really bad news— the worst.”
26
I hadn’t called her “Mum” in years. The word always felt unnatural 27
in my mouth, as though it didn’t belong to the woman in front of me.
28
She tilted her head to the left. She nodded again, more vigorously
29
this time, urging me to say it, to tell her, to stop this unnecessary
30
stalling.
31S
“It’s about Emma.”
32N
She stared at me. I continued.
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S E V E N L I E S
29 9
“I went to see her,” I said. “Like I said I would, to check that she was
01
okay. She hadn’t been answering her phone. And when I turned up,
02
she didn’t answer her door. I had to call the police eventually because
03
no one would let me into the flat, and then they arrived. They opened
04
the door.”
05
I wanted her to say something, but she sat silent, and so I continued
06
to tell her what had happened, reeling through the moments that hap-
07
pened next, my thoughts, my fears, all the ways this might have ended
08
differently. I knew that she was bewildered, but I couldn’t slow down.
09
I told her that her daughter was dead in words I’d never used before,
10
words that were waiting within me but that I’d hoped would stay there
11
always.
12
“Mum,” I said, “she’s gone. They think it was her heart.”
13
I think that then she finally understood, because she gasped and her
14
eyes took on this wild, startled stare. She opened and closed her mouth,
Seven Lies (ARC) Page 41