by Holly Seddon
I don’t know what to say. There are whole years of my sister’s life that I knew about only in postcard-sized bites. I never told her what was happening below the surface of my life in Atlanta, and she never told me what was really going on in Berkshire. A lot of empty letters.
Robin tells me that she’s been getting letters now, at this house. That she’s been struggling to cope with anything unexpected. That while she’s filed the unopened bills away, chucked junk mail in the recycling without thought, that these bright white letters have haunted her. She’d thought they might be connected to the knocks on the door. “But if they were, Rez would have admitted to them, right? Anyway, the postmark was from down south and he says he lives up here now.”
“Down south?”
“Yeah. It sounds ridiculous,” she adds, “but it’s how plain they are that bothers me. Someone’s typed my address on a plain white envelope and used a proper postage stamp, not one of those office franking machines. Like it’s a person sending them, one after the other. It’s just…odd. It spooks me.”
“A lot spooks you,” I want to say. And she was always so brave. When we watched Jaws as kids, I’d had to sleep in with Mum and Dad, while she made the boys at school play shark games in the swimming pool, before the council closed it because it was leaking and filled with slime.
“Go get the letters,” I say. “I’ll open them for you and we’ll handle it together.” I want a chance to be strong for her. How hard can it be? It’s just opening a few letters. But like pulling the wardrobe doors open to check for ghosts in a child’s bedroom, the moment just before the doors part, your adult heart still beats a bit faster.
Robin gets out of bed slowly and trudges downstairs to the spare bedroom she uses as an office. She returns with a small, neat stack. I open the top one carefully, using my finger briskly like a scissor. I pull the letter out. The light is bad but I scan it quickly. It looks official.
“It’s just an advert for a fashion-magazine subscription,” I say, being strong for her. “Weird how they’d bother to put it in an envelope.”
“Seriously?” she says, but she doesn’t reach for the letter, and I put them all on the floor before she can think to.
“Yeah,” I say, and I hop out of bed. “Just going to the loo.”
She laughs. Throws her head back and laughs. As I go out of the door, I cast a glance back and see my sister throw herself backward on the bed and take a long, deep breath. She looks just like she did when we were young, a tiny little scruffy thing making big gestures. I’ve discreetly brought the letters with me, down the stairs and into the kitchen. I find the key on a hook and open the back door slowly, like a safecracker. I step outside with my bare feet. The ground is gritty and cool. It’s a relief after the stuffy house. I ease the lid of the wheelie bin open, stuff the letters in as deep as I can, and snap it closed. I lock the kitchen up quickly, rush up to the loo and then back into bed.
“You okay?” says Robin. “I thought I heard the door.”
“Yeah,” I say, trying to keep my voice and breathing steady. “Just wanted to get a bit of fresh air and a drink.”
“Did you lock up properly?” she asks lightly, and I know she’s not asking lightly.
“Yes, don’t worry. You really don’t have to worry about anything, Robin. I promise.”
There’s a pause. “I’m so fucking relieved,” Robin finally says.
“Good,” I say, a little triumphant. “And I really appreciate you letting me stay. I’ll get the rest of my stuff in the morning, if you’re sure it’s okay?”
She sits back up and reaches her hand for mine. “Of course it’s okay. You’re my sister.”
We fall asleep still holding hands, and as I drift away, somewhere deeper than I’ve gone in weeks, I allow myself to think that maybe my sister and I and Violet too, that we might all be okay. Even after all.
ROBIN|PRESENT DAY
Sarah sleeps soundly now, her steady breath in and out transporting Robin back to many nights in childhood, crammed in the same room for one reason or another. But Robin’s relief has given way to questions. Lying on the bed and not under it still doesn’t come easy. Sarah’s hand is curled around Robin’s fingers and she slips them free one by one. Sarah murmurs and rolls onto her side.
Robin stares at the ceiling and tries to wrap her head around everything that’s happened today. All those paths colliding in her life, in one day. Henry. Rez. Sarah.
But things aren’t resolved, not really. Henry was off to stay with his mum and hopefully that would be okay. Rez had shrunk back down to size, his anger washed away to reveal sadness and vulnerability. Feelings she was battling to stay detached from. But Sarah, her poor sister who always tried to do the right thing, be the good girl, all those lies had torn her life apart. A life she deserved to live. A life she deserved to get back.
Lying has caused enough damage. Leaving those lies in place and hiding up here wasn’t going to help Sarah, and only the truth held some hope for any of them.
Giving up on sleep, Robin treads lightly on the stairs. Sarah’s phone is in her hand. Robin uses the light of the screen to find her way. She creeps into the living room, turns the lamp on and scans the room from the relative safety of the doorway. It’s all as she left it. Neat, clean, warm. She closes the door quietly and goes to sit on the smaller sofa.
There are fewer than a handful of numbers on this phone. Literally, four. A curry place, somewhere called Cornell Lodge, Jim’s mum and Jim.
Jim’s is a mobile number. It’s late, but it’s important. Tomorrow’s sun might scare Robin’s resolve away, and she owes it to her sister.
She presses “Call.” There’s a terrible pause and then the ringer crackles into life. Eight rings. She’s about to hang up, half relieved, when a man’s voice answers.
“Hello?” He sounds sleepy, but she doesn’t apologize for waking him. Bigger truths are at stake.
“Hi, Jim,” she exhales. “You don’t know me, but I’m Sarah’s sister. I’m calling because there are some things that I need to clear up. About my sister.” Robin hears the breathing at the end of the line grow faster.
“She didn’t lie to you for bad reasons, Jim. She’s not done the things you think she has. She loves Violet more than anything, but she was covering up a lot of stuff that happened in her, in our, past, and she dug herself into a hole.”
Jim doesn’t say anything for a long while. Finally he asks, “What’s your name?”
“I’m Robin. Robin Marshall. I’m Sarah’s sister. And she’s with me in Manchester right now because she had nowhere else to go and she was scared and didn’t want to make everything worse.” Adrenaline is causing Robin to waffle, but she has to keep going or she’ll lose her nerve and hang up. Jim remains silent.
“But I promise you that everything you think about her is wrong. She’d never hurt a child. Please, Jim, please give her the chance to explain it all. She misses you and she misses Violet and she wants to put everything right and I promise you, on my life, she deserves a chance to explain.”
There’s a long pause.
“Sarah,” he says. “You’re Sarah’s sister?”
“Yes.”
“She told me she had no family.”
“She had her reasons, but they weren’t the reasons you might think.”
“I don’t care. I needed to be able to trust her. She was looking after the most important thing to us, to me. And she lied in the most despicable ways. Did the most despicable things.”
“No,” Robin says, realizing she was making everything worse. “No, she would never do anything to hurt anyone. It’s all a horrible misunderstanding. She still loves you—”
“She’s not supposed to love me!” he says, louder than before. “She was just supposed to take good, safe care of Violet.”
Robin can’t help herself—the old flame bursts into life again. “That’s a horrible attitude to have toward your wife,” she says. “Doesn’t she deserve a loving rel
ationship too?”
“My wife’s dead,” he says, his voice strangled. “Sarah was our nanny.”
FORTY-THREE
ROBIN|PRESENT DAY
Robin is silent, her heart banging around in her chest. She’s heard only fractions of what Jim is saying, but she’s trying to put it into the right order. She can’t make it fit, because it makes no sense.
“I mean, Sarah was a godsend after Elaine died, and Violet adored her, but she crossed so many lines, even before…” He trails off.
Sarah is not Violet’s mother. She is not Jim’s wife. She is not desperately seeking help to win her own family back. In fact, Robin doesn’t know what, or who, her sister really is. A cold wind runs up and down Robin’s legs. She hadn’t seen her sister in years. But she didn’t think to question any of what she said. Who was the woman upstairs?
“Are you still there?” His voice is impatient, confused.
“Yeah,” Robin gasps. “I just…this is news to me. I don’t really understand. So you’re really not married to my sister?”
“No. Absolutely not. She was our live-in nanny.”
“Just your nanny,” Robin repeats, trying to make the word fit comfortably in her mouth.
“Look, she was great at first, but she got way too attached and her behavior became stranger and stranger. I kept her on for the consistency and, honestly, because I had my own stuff to deal with, but then she crossed a line. More than one. Lots of lines. My daughter is my priority.”
“And Violet? She’s your daughter. But not—”
“She’s my daughter. Sarah is absolutely not her mother. No matter what she liked to tell people, as it turned out.”
“And your wife, she…” Robin feels her cheeks color, can’t bring herself to say it out loud.
“My wife is dead,” he says.
Robin says nothing and Jim says nothing.
“We had to sack Sarah,” he says finally. “I’d let it all go too far and Violet paid the price. My parents wanted me to go to the police then and there, but I couldn’t bear for Violet to go through that. Being interviewed, going to court. God, no. That little girl has been through enough.”
Robin imagines someone watching her from behind, but when she turns around, there’s no one there; the lounge door is still closed. Her paranoia is so finely tuned it’s hard for her to know when she should switch it off. Now is probably the right time to be paranoid, she reasons.
After apologizing to Jim and hanging up, Robin opens the door and steps into the hall. She listens at the bottom of the stairs; everything is still. She walks into the kitchen, quietly opens a bottle of beer from the fridge and leans against the sideboard.
As Robin sips, she goes over Sarah’s story in her head, tries to believe it. But Jim’s words push it away and take over. He had no reason to lie to her, especially with such a tall tale. But Sarah did. If she wanted Robin to help her keep this secret baby, even try to snatch Violet or God knows what, she’d tell her anything she needed to. Robin looks at the back door.
Why would Sarah come down into the kitchen and open the door, when she said she was going to the loo?
Robin goes to listen at the bottom of the stairs again, hears nothing. She pulls on her trainers and goes back into the dimly lit kitchen. Using the light from Sarah’s phone, she fumbles with the back door and opens it as quietly as she can. To get out there, she tells herself it’s bin day. She manages to put the rubbish out sometimes, under cover of darkness. She’d manage it now.
Bin day. The letters.
Her heart bangs harder in her chest as she steps out on shaking legs. Two steps, three. The bin isn’t far, but the sky over the garden is as big and gray as death.
She flips the lid open quietly, shines the screen light inside. Two neatly tied black bags sit in there from last week, but to the side of one of them, something white catches the light. It’s very white indeed, reflective almost. Robin looks up at the flats ignoring her, leans in and grabs it.
She closes the bin, practically jumps back through the kitchen door and locks it quickly. She pulls the letter out of the opened envelope. It feels even more of a ticking bomb than it had lying in a stack for months.
She reads it.
It’s from the police.
A family member attacked by Sarah Granger, her sister. It says that Sarah should have been in contact, registering her whereabouts. That’s she’s missing. That the woman upstairs in Robin’s house right now is a possible risk to other family members. It gives a number to call, not open now until morning.
Robin knew Sarah had had some trouble before she left Birch End for good. It was hinted at in the stilted calls with Hilary that Robin had neglected for months, maybe years. But violence? Sarah was never a violent person, never a risk to anyone. At risk, more like.
Robin doesn’t know if anything that Sarah has told her since arriving today is true. Her compulsion to run from all of this is strong, but there’s nowhere to go within the house that is any safer than right here, armed with only a phone that isn’t hers.
Her only hope of making sense of this night is to fill in any blanks she can, try to understand what she’s actually dealing with. She can’t think beyond that. Robin calls the number still etched in her mind after all these years. It’s late, but she would answer. Their generation always answers late-night calls.
A click at the other end. “Hello?”
Robin’s throat is sore from using her voice more today than she has for nearly three years. Her voice croaks out the name.
“Hilary?”
A pause. “Yes?”
She clears her throat but speaks barely above a whisper. “It’s Robin. I’m sorry to call so late.”
“Robin!” Hilary’s voice is thinner than ever. “Darling! Are you okay? What’s going on?”
“Hilary,” Robin says again, feels her eyes spill sudden tears down her cheeks. For a moment, she just sobs, a sound she’s not made in a long time, while her stepmother listens and waits as she always did.
“Sorry,” Robin splutters.
“Shh, shh, what’s wrong?”
“Sarah’s here, Hilary. She just turned up today and I don’t know what to do.”
“Sarah’s there? With you, in Manchester?”
“Yes, she turned up out of the blue this morning.”
“Oh Robin.” Hilary pauses. “This is my fault. I tried to put her off. I told her you were in Manchester but I didn’t give her your address. She must have found it herself, I’m sorry.”
“But I want to see my sister, I just, there’s more…”
“Are you alone with her?”
“Yes, why?”
“Just be careful, give her room to move, okay? She’s changed a bit since…well, when did you last see her?”
“Dad’s funeral,” Robin whispers.
“Mmn,” Hilary says, pausing as she always does at the mention of Jack. Seconds tick by. “Well, between then and leaving Birch End, she had a few difficulties, you know? And she’s worked very hard to put them behind her, so be gentle with her. We don’t want her to slip back. And I don’t want…” The seconds tick by. “You just be a little careful, okay? She can be a bit unpredictable.”
“Did she hurt you?”
“Me? No, never. Why did you think that?”
“I had a letter. Saying Sarah had hurt a family member and was supposed to register her whereabouts or something. Who did she hurt? Was she in trouble with the police?”
Tick, tick, tick. “No,” Hilary eventually said, making the word as long and thin as it could be. “Not exactly. Sort of. She had a bit of a crisis, couldn’t really handle a lot of the things that had happened, maybe things we don’t even know about that she hinted at, and she…I suppose the expression is that she ‘snapped.’ But she got help and she got better.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well,” Hilary said, “we didn’t want to worry you. And you and Sarah hadn’t been close for a while. It seemed
better for us to just contain it and get her some help.”
“Who is ‘us’?”
That deathly pause again. “Your mother and I.”
“Who did she attack?”
“Robin, you should probably call your mum. She can help you.”
“When has she ever helped me?”
None of this made any sense to Robin. After bidding goodbye to Hilary, promising to call with an update the next day, she dialed before she could overthink it. A number she was surprised she still knew, years and years after she’d last rung.
It rings for so long Robin has time to panic. She does not want to call this house. She does not want to hear either of the voices that might answer. Eventually, a woman’s voice says uneasily, “Hello?”
“Angela?”
“Yes. Is this…?”
She clears her throat. “Yes, it’s Robin.”
“Oh Robin.” There’s a pause. “I’m so pleased to hear your voice. Is everything okay?”
It’s been seven years since we saw each other’s faces. Is everything okay?
“I need to know something.”
“Okay.” Her mother sounds wary but not surprised.
“Did Sarah attack Drew? Did she assault him for all the harm he caused our family? And did you and Hilary keep it from me?”
There’s a pause. Robin fills it with angry thoughts.
“No, Robin,” Angela eventually says. “No, she didn’t.”
Robin rocks on her heels and rubs her temples with one hand. “Don’t lie to me, Angela. I know she hurt someone in our family, and I know you and Hilary ‘dealt’ with it. I’ve been sent a letter. So who was it?”