Look for Her

by Emily Winslow

  If she had stayed in Canada, she wouldn’t be dead.

  THE MEDS KICKED in. Breathing didn’t hurt any more. I found a position I could rest in and stayed in it. Someone brought some disgusting food and left it next to me where I had to smell it. The police detective came back and wanted to talk to me again. This time I was ready.

  “What’s the last thing you remember, Sandra?”

  I shook my head. “Anna,” I corrected him. Everyone at uni called me that, because it’s a perfectly good nickname for Sandra and I prefer it, but I’ve had to correct my family for years. I still do.

  “Anna … Williams?” he asked, maybe wondering if he had the wrong girl.

  “Yes,” I said. My head rolled onto my other cheek. This was tiring. “My mother named me Sandra.”

  “She’s been here,” he told me. “You were asleep.”

  Tears. It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair. Look what she made me do.

  “Would you like me to call her?”

  “No.”

  He had a phone in his hand, and he kept glancing at it. I don’t know if he had notes there, or Facebook, or what.

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  The doctor had already asked me something like that, except he’d wanted to know the year. I’d got it right. I’m not as fucked up as I might have been.

  “It’s Saturday,” I said, and then I wondered how long I’d been here. “Isn’t it?”

  “It is. Do you remember what you were doing today?”

  “Hannah-Claire’s dead.”

  He nodded.

  “Today was her funeral,” I elaborated. “I’m wearing black,” I pointed out.

  “Were you and your cousin close?” he asked, I suppose leaping from black clothes to being best, best friends.

  “She was my cousin,” I said, because it was none of his business how I felt about her.

  “Do you remember the funeral?”

  Do I? I had to think about that. I remembered the church. I remembered the coffin. Henry had insisted on burying the body instead of cremation, but it hadn’t been open, thank God. As I understand it, drowned people look terrifying. I breathed harder.

  “Yes.” I swallowed. Swallowing hurt. I wondered if I’d been punched in the throat too.

  “Do you remember after the funeral?”

  My heart was beating faster. I said, “No,” because I wanted to not remember.

  “Are you sure?”

  I shut my eyes. Squeezing hurt the eye that was swollen, but I squeezed anyway.

  “Henry,” I said.

  “What about Henry?” the detective asked.

  I kept my eyes closed. “I talked to him.”

  “About what?”

  “About Hannah-Claire.”

  When Hannah had moved in with Henry, she’d let me take her Cambridge flat. She was quitting her museum job to marry him and be free to travel on his business trips, so she didn’t need to be there any more. And my parents had found out that I’d fucked up uni, instead of graduating like I’d told them I had, so I couldn’t really stay at home any more. Hannah would have never said no to me asking. She wanted us all to like her, including me, so she had said yes.

  She hadn’t moved everything out yet, so of course I used her desktop computer. It was just there, like a piece of furniture. I just used it for normal computer things. Her bookmarks were news sites and art history for work and one tame erotica site that she’d kept tucked away at the end of the list. And she had left her passwords in there, so sometimes I read her email. It was funny to do that, that’s all. She sometimes emailed her work friend at the museum about Henry, which is how the police knew what we already knew: that Henry wasn’t always nice.

  She never said he hit her, but he made her feel terrible, like she maybe deserved to be hit. Once he pushed her. I bet that was why he was arrested about her death, but they’d had to let him go again. Of course they had. Pushing her in general doesn’t mean that he’d pushed her into the river. They’d had no evidence. There was nothing they could have done, not without actual proof of serious violence.

  I’d been sure that I could get him to do what I needed him to.

  The detective starting talking again. I’d been quiet too long. “A witness says they saw you and Henry together.”

  My throat tensed up. What had they seen? “I was crying. He gave me a hug.”

  That was true. I’d followed him into the back part of the church after he’d been outside for a smoke. I’d touched his arm as if I was lonely and sad and he’d touched me back.

  “A hug,” the detective repeated.

  “We really needed each other,” I said, and tears popped out as if I really was grieving, as if I really was lonely. “We needed something,” I amended. “Have you ever just needed to touch another person as proof that you exist?”

  The detective wrote something down. Maybe exactly what I was saying.

  I chose my words very, very carefully: “I just wanted to … to kiss and be close … but he was … he was forceful. He pushed me into this small room … storage, really … and I liked kissing him but after a while he, then he … And then he … hit me.”

  “Where?” he asked.

  I looked at the detective’s face. He was indignant for me. I felt my face get warm. I pointed to my cheek. “He slapped me. I slapped him back. That’s the last thing I remember.”

  It genuinely was.

  “Will you be willing to testify in court?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s very strong,” I added. “Hannah-Claire was afraid of him.”

  He looked up. “She told you that?”

  “She didn’t …” I covered my mouth.

  “What exactly did she say?”

  I thought carefully. “She loved him more than he loved her. She always tried not to do anything wrong.”

  He wrote that down.

  “Would you allow the nurse to take scrapings from under your fingernails, please?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you think we should do a rape kit?”

  I shook my head. “He didn’t …”

  “Good.” He looked down at his phone. “Your mother wants to know if you’re awake.”

  My mother thinks she wants to know things but she never really does. She wants to know only the right things, right to her. She cares about appearances more than about people. Which is why I hadn’t been able to tell her about uni, that I was losing my mind near the end, that I couldn’t face the last exams. I tried to write my thesis, I honestly tried, and in my head I did, I wrote so much. But on the page there was just nothing. I ended up trashing my computer—which is why I had to use Hannah-Claire’s in her flat; it’s not as if I snooped just to snoop—and I’d told my advisor that I’d lost everything. Saying I was too stupid to have made a backup felt better than admitting that there hadn’t been anything to back up in the first place. I told my friends that I couldn’t face starting it over. Then I just stopped. I didn’t go to lectures any more. I stayed on a friend’s couch for a few months. I came home when the term was done and told my mother that I just didn’t want to go to graduation. She was busy with work and her husband and relieved not to have to spend a weekend taking pictures of me with all of those people she didn’t know. She’d already done that with Sadie. Dad came to that and Mum hated having him around. Of course, if he hadn’t come she would have complained that he just didn’t care.

  She found out that I hadn’t actually finished when a friend’s mother bumped into her in London. Small damn world. By then I was living back at home. Well, with her, but it was the law office house, not the home I’d grown up in. And I knew her husband didn’t like having me there. They argued a lot, though I can’t actually say that it was because of me, can I? Maybe they argue anyway. Maybe they argue every single night after they work together all day downstairs, even with me not there any more.

  She always sounds the same when she argues, with me, with him, with Dad.

  W
ith nurses.

  “My daughter is here and I’m not leaving until I see her!”

  “She’s with the police right now …”

  “I am unnerved that no one phoned to tell me that she’s awake.”

  “She’s over eighteen, ma’am, and …”

  “What is your name?”

  It went on like that. The detective and I held our positions, not speaking, with only a flimsy curtain between us and her.

  A visibly shaken young nurse literally said “knock-knock” before tugging the curtain aside. “Excuse me, Detective Sergeant. Ms. Williams, your mother is here.”

  “Thank you, Milly,” Mum said icily, pulling the curtain wider. “DS Spencer,” she added, nodding to the detective. Ah, his name was Spencer. That’s right.

  He nodded back. “Mrs. Williams.”

  I stiffened. I knew she wasn’t going to let that blow over.

  “Mrs. Rigg,” she corrected him. I think she was prouder of that surname than anything else about her. I honestly don’t know if she was upset that I hadn’t taken it too, or if she’d been relieved to keep it to herself, just she and him. I’d already changed my name once for her, from my Dad’s name, Bennet, to her maiden name, Williams, when I was a kid. I hadn’t wanted to change it again when I was at university. And when I get married someday, I won’t change it then either, unless it’s to something that the two of us pick together.

  “Thank you, Ms. Williams. I’ll be in touch.” Detective Spencer left. The nurse was already gone. I was alone with her.

  “Are you staying here tonight?” she asked me.

  I honestly didn’t know. The doctor hadn’t told me yet.

  “Sadie has offered to stay with you at Hannah’s flat, if that’s required. Concussions, you know.”

  “It’s my flat now, Mum.”

  “It’s her name on the lease, so if the landlord puts two and two together you can’t really act surprised, now can you? You’ll always have a place with us if you need it, but you have to show you’re actually trying, do you understand? And if you want to finish your degree I’ll see what I can do but I can’t promise that Nigel—”

  “I don’t want to finish. I’m working. It’s fine.” It’s a phone job. It sucks. But it’s fine.

  “Well. That’s good to hear.” She didn’t ask for details.

  She didn’t ask for details about what happened after the funeral either. Maybe she was being considerate of my feelings and readiness. Ha, no … Maybe she’s so wrapped up in her own secrets that she automatically assumes no one else wants to share theirs.

  Milly the nurse came back, with trepidation. “The detective asked me to scrape under your fingernails.”

  “What on earth for?” my mother demanded at the same time that I said, “That’s fine.”

  “It’s for the investigation,” I said, while Milly took my hands. “They think that Henry did it.”

  “Henry?” She seemed genuinely shocked.

  “It was Henry, Mum.” It was suddenly difficult to speak. I felt squeezed inside.

  “He hit you? He hurt you?” Her hands traced my injuries in the air, just inches away from my body.

  “He did it all, Mum. Hannah-Claire too. He did everything and the police are going to make him pay for it.”

  That’s when I cried, great big gushes of tears, pumped out by deep breaths and heaves that hurt my abdomen. But I didn’t close my eyes. I watched Mum’s face. I wanted to see that spark of recognition. I wanted to see that she understood.

  But she closed her own eyes, and covered her closed eyes with her hands after that. I kept looking and looking, as if my stare could pry open her fingers and eyelids, and as if there’d be something important to see once I did.

  I DID STAY in the hospital that night.

  It was easy to fall asleep but I kept waking up.

  And each time I thought I was hearing my mother arguing with a nurse about visiting me, but she wasn’t there. I was just remembering.

  It was Hannah-Claire’s fault. She had caused all of this, all of it, by trying to make us into a family for her after her parents died. It’s because of her that my mother had to argue with my dad, who wasn’t even supposed to be in the house. Mum’s husband doesn’t like him, obviously. But Mr. Rigg was away and it was a weekend and Mum didn’t know I’d come back from the shops. I had, though, and there was Dad’s car, and I could hear them through the kitchen windows. I had stayed outside. Mum still doesn’t know I heard what she asked him to do.

  It had been warm then. It was spring, with me home for Easter break. Hannah-Claire had already been in England since a month after her father’s funeral. Mum was the one to fly out for it, because Hannah’s adoptive parents were her aunt and uncle. Mum came home quiet, which is normal when family members die, but this quiet had gone on and on. By the time she got my dad in the house, all of the saved-up loudness and sharpness were bursting out of her. She’d asked him for one thing, “One thing, Charlie!” and he’d said no.

  I remember that I was on the gravel driveway when I started listening, not on the soft lawn, because as I realised what I was hearing I had to be super careful to not stir up any gravel in a way that they could hear. I worried that even the sun glinting off my bicycle frame might signal them to look in my direction. I held very still.

  Everything made sense, suddenly, but it was an ugly sort of sense. Sadie is my older sister, and I always felt like I never lived up to her. But, more than that, there was always the feeling of something else that neither of us was living up to. I used to look in my mirror figuring out which parts of me look like my dad, and maybe that’s what she sees when she looks at me. But it wasn’t only that. It turns out that there was someone before both of us, someone before me and before Sadie. I’ve been jealous of Hannah-Claire all my life; even without really knowing her I’d been jealous of her, and it turns out that I was right to be. It turns out that Hannah-Claire was Mum’s first. Before me, before Sadie, even before Dad.

  Oh, Mum and Dad had known each other then. (Of course I later looked up Hannah-Claire’s birth date and matched her life with Mum’s school years to see how they fit together.) But Mum and Dad weren’t together yet then. That’s what Mum was asking him to lie about. She wanted to tell Hannah-Claire the truth when she came to England. But Mr. Rigg is rather strict about some things. Mum adjusted for him; that’s a nicer way of saying “changed.” She dressed more conservatively now, with higher necklines and longer hems. She stopped swearing. He didn’t like her past with Dad, but he’d accepted it; further reconciling himself to a past before that, a past with some random boy who wasn’t even a serious boyfriend, and with whom she’d had a secret child, well, she didn’t think he would accept that. So she asked Dad to say that Hannah was his.

  “Charlie,” she’d said, in a sweet, wheedling tone. “Nigel already hates you. It’ll be nothing different for you. But this way he won’t hate me.”

  I held my breath waiting for his answer. Birds kept tweeting and a squirrel made some kind of thud on the ridiculous, elaborate bird feeder the receptionist had set up on the lawn, but I was silent. The kitchen was silent. Then Dad’s voice burst out.

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to!”

  “No, I can’t. I won’t. I don’t want another child.”

  “She’s not a child! She’s a grown woman! You won’t have to do anything, anything at all.”

  “Is that what she’ll say, you think? Or will she want some kind of ‘father figure’ in her life?”

  “Well, Sadie and Sandra would appreciate a father figure but you’ve never felt compelled to do much for them!”

  Silence in the kitchen again. The squirrel scrabbling on the round top of the feeder.

  “That’s exactly my point. Exactly.” I heard a chair scraping against the stone tiles. He was about to exit the house.

  I pushed through the gravel to the grass and walked quickly around the other side of the house, keeping my head down as if th
at would help. I heard the front door open and footsteps on the porch.

  Mum begged him, “Please. She’s my child. I want to be able to tell her that.”

  “Tell her then,” Dad said. “But leave me out of it.”

  He drove away. I waited around the back of the house for fifteen minutes before circling around to the front and pretending to arrive then. I went straight upstairs to my room. I slept in the tower when I was home. I knew that Hannah-Claire’s therapist thought it was fucked up to keep thinking and thinking about a dead girl who you didn’t even know, but the room I slept in faced the spot where she’d been eventually dug up, so how was I supposed to help it?

  Mum didn’t tell her. I felt like I held my breath at every enforced family gathering in the first few months that she was here, but nothing blew up. Mum was happy to have become Mrs. Rigg, as far away from Mrs. Bennet as she could get. And better than Ms. Williams. We’d had some difficult years after the divorce. She didn’t want to risk losing what she’d finally attained.

  It was summer, when Mum and Dad still thought I’d graduated, when Hannah-Claire had cosied up to share some feelings with me. She told me that she had been going through her parents’ papers and had found her birth mother’s medical records. She’d always known she was adopted; she’d been adopted by her grandparents from their daughter who had died. That’s what she had always been told. But the blood type wasn’t right. She asked me to look at some papers she had.

  “I’m type O,” she’d said. “I’m a universal donor. That’s why I give blood whenever I can.”

  I internally rolled my eyes.

  “But see? It says here that she was blood type AB. And my mother”—by this she meant her adoptive mother, who she thought was her biological grandmother—“well, she was too. See?” She pulled out another piece of paper. Then she pulled out a chart. “But look. An AB parent can’t make a type O child. They just can’t. See?”