My Sister's Bones

by Nuala Ellwood

  He was here, I tell myself. He was right here. I stand for a moment at the window, where a spider has woven a silvery web. From this angle I can see my bedroom window quite clearly though the curtains are closed. I can see a quarter of the kitchen window and can just make out the shape of the plant pots that line the patio by the back door. He could see me. He knew I was there and he wanted my help.

  And I have felt his presence. Ever since I arrived at my mother’s house I’ve had the feeling I am being watched.

  A child can’t just disappear, I tell myself as I fling aside more boxes and gardening tools. It just isn’t possible. I didn’t imagine it; I know I didn’t. He was here, banging at the window.

  “Please, will you just come out,” I cry, throwing aside more detritus. “You don’t need to hide from me.”

  And then out of the corner of my eye I see a light. My stomach contracts. I go to the window and see that the kitchen light has come on. If Fida or her husband finds me here I’ll be in serious trouble.

  I look around one last time. Nothing. But as I make my way to the door I hear voices. They are coming from the garden. Shit. I leap back into the shed, close the door, and crouch in the corner.

  I hear the crunch of footsteps coming down the path and my heart flips in my chest. They are outside the door. They are going to come in. They are going to find me.

  But after a couple of moments of terrifying silence I hear the footsteps going back toward the house. I put my hands to my mouth and exhale slowly. I was so close to being discovered. What the hell would they have said if they’d found me in here?

  I give it a couple of minutes, then creep toward the window and look out. The kitchen light is off. They must have gone back to bed.

  After waiting a while longer I open the shed door and scurry across the garden to the fence. There’s no sign of anyone. But as I climb onto the chair, all I can think about is the boy, his terrified little face.

  “He was there,” I whisper, steadying myself as the chair rocks beneath my weight. “He was right there.”

  I jump down onto the stony remains of my mother’s flower bed, and my bare feet sink into the soil. For some reason as I stand up and cross the lawn I think of Chris and that last trip to Venice. We were walking around a farmers’ market when one of the stallholders started to yell. His grill had caught fire. People were screaming and running away but Chris went straight toward the fire and helped put it out. He always knew what to do. It was one of the things I loved about him. His resilience and strength. If only he were here now, he would find a way to help that child. He would know what to do. But he’s not here and all I have is my own gut instinct. I have to trust it, I think to myself as I head back to the house. I have to be brave.

  19

  Herne Bay Police Station

  33.5 hours detained

  Shaw nods her head as she walks back into the room. We’ve had a ten-minute break during which I was offered a cup of coffee and a sandwich filled with orange stringy cheese. I sipped the coffee and left the sandwich untouched and now it lies congealing on the table beside me as Shaw sits down and opens up her briefcase. There’s something different about her. Almost sad. She takes out a sheet of paper and places it on her lap. I see the words “University College Hospital” and I know what is coming before she even opens her mouth.

  “Can we talk about the baby, Kate?”

  The room contracts as I sit looking at the last moments of my child; one solitary paragraph on a piece of paper.

  “What do you want to know?” I reply. “It seems you have it all there in front of you.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “It must have been devastating.”

  Her voice is sorely lacking in empathy and this puts me on guard.

  “Why? It happens every day, doesn’t it?”

  Shaw doesn’t respond. She thinks I’m heartless.

  I take my bag and root around for the photo. This woman thinks I’m some kind of psychopath. I have to prove to her that I have feelings, that I’m a human being, someone who cares. I find my wallet and pull out a small, square piece of paper.

  “Here,” I say as I hand it to her. “My first scan.”

  Shaw takes it and I watch as she squints at the fuzzy image.

  “It was a boy, apparently,” I say, taking the picture from her hand and placing it back into my bag.

  “I know this is incredibly difficult, Kate,” she says, reciting the words like an automaton. “But it will help so much if you can just share a little of what happened. I understand you miscarried the day of the altercation with Rachel Hadley.”

  “Yes, I’d just left the office when it . . .”

  I pause, remembering the lift plunging downward and the blood staining my trousers. One more thing I couldn’t keep alive.

  “Did anyone go with you to the hospital?”

  “No.”

  “So you went through the whole thing alone?”

  I nod my head. The sharp hospital smell still lingers in my nostrils as I try to recall the events of that evening. But it’s all a blur. I was in so much pain I could only make out faint outlines; the doctors and nurses were just bluish wisps on the edges of my consciousness.

  “How far into the pregnancy were you?”

  “Four months,” I tell her. “But according to the doctor the baby had died two weeks earlier.”

  The guilt is still as raw as it was when it happened. Even knowing that he had been dead throughout it all and had nothing to do with Chris or the bottle of wine, the fact that I failed my baby gnaws away at me. I should have been strong for him and I wasn’t.

  “You spent the night in the hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  I look down at my feet as I recall the tiny room with a curtain separating me from the corridor. I was handed a cardboard potty and told to pee into that rather than the toilet so they could monitor the stages of the miscarriage. It was undignified in the extreme but I was so full of painkillers I barely registered when the nurse came in to take the potty away.

  I birthed the dead baby sometime around dawn. I remember the sun was just coming up through the wire railings of the hospital parking lot. I was standing by the window when I felt something shift. I ran to the bathroom with the potty and watched as this tiny, gray creature slipped out. My child.

  I blink my tears away as Shaw plunges into her next question.

  “The baby’s father?” she asks. “Did he come to see you?”

  “No,” I reply. “He didn’t know I was pregnant.”

  “Why didn’t he know?”

  “I didn’t have the chance to tell him,” I reply. “I’d planned on telling him that day, over lunch, but before I could he told me the relationship was over.”

  I see him in my mind’s eye, sitting at the table waiting for me. His hands were clasped in front of him and he was staring fixedly at a picture on the wall: a Chagall print of a naked woman, hanging like a piece of fruit from a heart-shaped tree.

  “That must have been hard,” says Shaw.

  “Yes, it was,” I reply. “But then part of me had been expecting it for years.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He was married.”

  I remember walking over to his table. He looked up at me and his face was so sad. He kissed me clumsily. His lips missed my mouth and caught my cheek instead. I went to kiss him but he turned his cheek. I just thought he was tired. I never would have imagined . . .

  “Married,” says Shaw, interrupting my thoughts. “And how long had you been seeing him?”

  I bristle at the term she uses. “Seeing him” makes it sound like a casual fling when it was so much more.

  “Ten years,” I reply. “Though we’d known each other much longer.”

  I want Shaw to know that it was serious. I want her to know that I am capable of loving and being loved; that I am not some messed-up crazy woman. So I tell her about him, my Chris, my love, the man I can’t live without. The man I must live withou
t.

  “We met in New York just after 9/11,” I begin. “He was a forensic anthropologist. He and his team were exhuming body parts from Ground Zero. I was reporting on the work they were doing.”

  My thoughts drift and I see myself standing looking at this beautiful man, his black hair covered in dirt, his large hands clasping a shovel. He was very tall, around six three, and, though strong, his body was lean and wiry. With his sharp cheekbones and thick beard he looked like a pioneer from the Midwest. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was only twenty-six and it was one of my first big assignments. I was nervous but when he introduced himself in his gruff Yorkshire accent I immediately felt at ease. It was as though we had known each other before. We spoke for about an hour. He answered my questions as best he could; he was polite, professional, but I knew, we both knew, right then, that something had happened between us, something unspoken.

  I look beyond Shaw’s head and stare at the pockmarked wall. I see us sitting outside a wine bar in Victoria. It was three years after our first meeting that we finally got together. He’d come down to London from his home in the north to attend a conference and we’d bumped into each other in the street. He asked me out for a drink and that was it. I can see his pale blue eyes twinkle as he tells me what he wants to do when we get back to my flat later. I hear him whisper every little bit of you; his low voice caressing each word as he takes my hand in his and rubs the dry surface of my skin.

  “Did you know he was married when you started seeing him?”

  Shaw’s voice brings me back to the room. I look at her, noticing a glint of gold on her wedding finger, and suddenly the pen in her hand is a weapon.

  “Yes, I knew.”

  “And did that bother you?”

  Her voice has hardened. I have to keep her onside. I can’t tell her my thoughts on marriage; how I never wanted to end up like my parents; that I didn’t want anything from Chris, just the knowledge that he would always come back to me; that knowing he loved me more than he would ever love his wife was enough. Though I know now that’s a lie. So I tell her what she wants to hear.

  “Yes, of course it bothered me.”

  “How did you feel about it? The pregnancy?”

  “Shocked at first,” I tell her. “Unprepared. But then I started to get used to the idea. Although that might have been the happy hormones kicking in.”

  Shaw nods her head and looks down at her notepad. She hates me, I can tell. I am the “other woman,” the kind women like her have nightmares about. But right now I would give anything to be in her place, to live a safe, cozy existence with a husband and family. As I sit waiting for her to continue, I feel so alone it physically hurts.

  “You say you’d planned this lunch to tell Chris about the baby?”

  “Yes.”

  The memory of his lips on my skin as he stood up from the table and greeted me burns through my body as I sit waiting for Shaw to go on.

  “But he chose to end the relationship before you got the chance to tell him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he give you a reason?”

  “His wife had found a message,” I say. “And she made him tell her everything, so he did.”

  My voice comes out like a croak. Chris is all around me. I can smell his cedarwood cologne, see his eyes narrow as he leans toward me, takes my hand, and says: It’s Helen. She knows.

  And with those words I knew it was over. Given a choice between his dependable wife and his flighty mistress, I was always going to come away the loser.

  “He agreed to break it off. Give their marriage another chance.”

  “That must have been a shock,” says Shaw, looking at me intently.

  “To be honest, I just felt numb,” I say.

  And it’s true. I did. They say emotional shock doesn’t strike until long after the event and as I sat there listening to him I found myself smiling. Jesus, I even agreed with him. I didn’t storm out of the restaurant or throw a glass of wine in his face or tell him that he was a bastard, I just sat there and ate my risotto and told him that, yes, this was all for the best.

  “Why didn’t you tell him about the baby?” asks Shaw.

  “I couldn’t.”

  Looking back now I guess I was paralyzed with grief. Yes, I could have told him about the baby, but it all felt so wrong, so tainted. He didn’t want me. He wouldn’t want our baby either.

  “And what did you do then?”

  Something tells me she knows the answer.

  “I went to my club on Greek Street.”

  “And is that where you drank the wine?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much did you drink?”

  “A couple of glasses. But before then I hadn’t drunk for . . . some time.”

  We stare at each other for a moment, doctor and patient, both taking in the seriousness of my admission, not mentioning the big things like babies and birth defects and safe limits.

  “And when you returned to the office you lost your temper with Rachel Hadley?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Can you understand it now?”

  Shaw doesn’t answer.

  “How long did you stay in the hospital?”

  “Just a night,” I reply. “The bleeding slowed down over the course of the morning and by midday it became clear that I would be bed blocking if I stayed any longer. They prescribed me a course of strong painkillers and I left.”

  “And then?”

  “I walked home. I wanted to think.”

  “Taking a detour by the Star Cafe?”

  “Yes,” I reply. “I didn’t really know where I was going though. I just needed to think.”

  “When the police finished talking to you, did you go home?”

  “Yes.”

  I think back to that evening. The scent of the hospital clung to my canvas knapsack as I climbed the stairs. I can smell it now as I sit here. Hospitals and jail cells have the same scent—a mix of chlorine and despair. When I opened the door to the flat my phone rang. It was Graham asking if I’d received the itinerary. And I pretended I was fine, that my world hadn’t just fallen apart. I told him I would see him in the morning and then I curled up into bed and cried myself to sleep.

  “I went to Syria the following day,” I say, looking up at Shaw. “With Graham, my photographer.”

  She looks flabbergasted.

  “The next day?” she exclaims. “Even though you’d just had a miscarriage?”

  “Women lose babies every day, Dr. Shaw,” I tell her. “This is my job. People were relying on me to go out there.”

  “Who was relying on you?”

  “The morning of the miscarriage I’d got a message from my close friend,” I tell her. “He’s a translator I’ve known for years and he told me that terrible things were happening in Aleppo. I felt I needed to go back and find out what was going on. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t.”

  “So apart from the translator, it was just going to be you and the photographer crossing the border into Syria?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did that concern you?”

  “No. We’d done this many, many times before. Graham was highly experienced and we’d worked together a lot over the years.”

  “And Chris? Did you let him know you were going?”

  “No, I didn’t tell Chris I was going. Why would I? We were over.”

  “And how would you describe your mental state at this point, as you prepared to return to Syria?”

  “My mental state?”

  “How were you feeling?” she goes on. “Were you happy, fearful, nervous?”

  I shake my head.

  “I was numb, Dr. Shaw,” I say. “Completely and utterly numb.”

  20

  Friday, April 17, 2015

  I am sitting at the table in my mother’s kitchen watching Paul as he prepares lunch. I haven’t mentioned last night. Part of me still isn’t sure it really happened. Although the soil I found on the kitchen floor this mo
rning tells me it must have. And even now, as I sit here with the back door open, I can smell my blood dream: a faint whisper of death.

  “I’ve bookmarked a shortlist for you to have a look at,” Paul says, his face moistening as he stands over a vat of steaming hot soup, pulverizing the liquid with a shiny chrome blender. Apparently he got the morning off work and thought it might be nice if we spent it looking at bathroom suites. Not exactly my idea of fun, but according to him a new bathroom will make all the difference once Mum’s house goes on the market.

  I look at the small black laptop that sits on the table in front of me. Paul has kindly opened up the bookmarked web pages and now it is down to me to decide between the gleaming white “Sorrel’ suite, the off-white hexagonal “Myriad,” the silvery-gray “Bartley,” and, the wild card, a burnt-orange number named “Sienna.” They all look fine to me and are similar in price. I told Paul that I would foot the bill for the bathroom. He has done so much already, it’s the least I can do.

  “I think we should go for the Myriad,” I say, moving the laptop to one side as he places a large bowl of vegetable soup in front of me. It smells sweet and nutty and my stomach growls with hunger. I hadn’t been able to face breakfast as, no matter how much I had scrubbed, the stench of the blood dream seemed to cling to my skin.

  “Are you sure the shape won’t put people off ?” asks Paul, taking the seat opposite me. He slices a hunk of bread from a granary loaf and places it on my plate. “Here, I got the seeded stuff from the fancy bakery for you.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “That’s really sweet of you.”

  I take the bread and dip a little into the soup.

  “I like the shape,” I say, putting the bread in my mouth. “Sharp edges are good. You should see my apartment, it’s one big sharp edge.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” says Paul. He pauses to slurp his soup. “I bet it’s all minimalist and white, your place.”

  “Yes, it is,” I reply. “It’s my reaction against all the chintz I grew up with.”

  “I’ll have to see it sometime, your flat,” says Paul. “Bring Sally too,” he adds. “Make a day of it.”

  “You’re more than welcome,” I reply. “But I can’t see Sally making the trip. I’ve lived in that flat for almost fifteen years and she hasn’t visited me once.”