Little Sister

by Isabel Ashdown

  Swiping tears from her cheek, Chloe gives a little nod of her head. “Yes. Just once, I forgot my front door key, and we went around the back and let ourselves in. He was with me when I fetched the spare from the greenhouse—but when we got inside, Jess was home, and Max went pretty quickly when we saw she was there. I doubt he even remembers about the spare key. It was ages ago.”

  “Did you put the key back?”

  “Yes. When Max had gone, Jess told me to return it to its hiding place, and we could forget all about it.”

  “Forget all about it?” asks Emily. “About what?”

  “About Max being there. Jess promised she wouldn’t tell you and Dad.”

  Emily turns to James, hoping to exchange a moment of united anger, but he won’t look at her. Out in the hallway, the phone is ringing again, and Emily glances toward the doorway, sees the briefest flash of Jess as she sprints past to grab it. It’s not a reporter, Emily can tell, by the way Jess wanders back past again, the phone held casually to her ear. Another bloody well-wisher, she thinks, another friend wanting the inside scoop. Why can’t they all just leave them alone? Another blur of movement, and DC Piper passes the door, having just arrived to take over from Cherry; Emily must tell DCI Jacobs she doesn’t want them here anymore, at least not staying overnight. It’s too much; it’s just too much.

  “So, Chloe,” continues DCI Jacobs, “where do you suppose that key is now, if you or Max haven’t got it?”

  She looks affronted. “How should I know? Dad or Emily probably used it—or Jess.”

  DCI Jacobs turns to Emily and James for their response.

  “No,” they both reply.

  “And I’ve already checked with your aunt, and she says she hasn’t used it either. So, we’ll need to get to the bottom of that, won’t we? We’ll be checking with Max once we’ve taken him in.”

  “Taken him in?” asks Chloe, aghast.

  “Yes, of course—we’ll need to talk to him—” DCI Jacobs breaks off as a call comes through on her mobile phone, sounding out the alarming ringtone of an old-fashioned telephone. She mouths an apology as she steps out of the room to take the call, leaving James, Emily, and Chloe sitting in silent and suppressed fury.

  When the inspector steps back in, it’s clear that the interview is over. “That was one of my officers,” she says. “They’re off to pick up Max now. It seems he does have a criminal record, Chloe, whether you knew about it or not, so we’re going to need to interview him as a matter of priority.”

  “What for?” James calls after DCI Jacobs, jumping up to follow her to the front door. “What’s the criminal record for?”

  Emily can hear the urgency in his voice, the fear, and she thinks, please, God, let it be a driving offence—a pub brawl—drugs. Please, God, let it not be to do with children—anything but that. She stands in the doorway of the living room, watching her husband and DCI Jacobs, their shapes darkened against the glass panels of the front door.

  Lowering her voice, the inspector tells him, “It looks like nothing more than petty theft and an old caution for possession of cannabis, but let’s keep that from Chloe for now, shall we? She might give us a bit more information on him if she thinks he’s been dishonest with her. Might encourage her to volunteer something useful?”

  James turns to look at Emily, his eyes searching for something—support, affection—love? Whatever it is, she can’t give it to him, and, as DCI Jacobs exits the house to the snap and flash of the waiting press, Emily heads up the stairs alone and returns to bed. Her last lucid thought is: Chloe has concealed this from them for all this time; what else could she be hiding?

  9

  Jess

  This morning I set off early to walk the Tennyson Trail alone, driving out to Alum Bay before dawn and reaching the hilltop monument in time for the Solent sunrise. There’s rarely anyone to be seen at this time of day, and the peace and serenity of this natural spectacle expands in my chest as I wrap my coat closer, pulling my scarf up over my nose and mouth. Somehow the crisp beauty of moments like this seems to sharpen the pain of losing Daisy; in the mundane, everyday grief of her absence, sensations are dulled, like sounds heard from below water. But the recurrence of these natural events, events that continue day after day in spite of our human tragedies . . . somehow such beauty has the power to illuminate and intensify feeling, and for the first time in days I allow my tears to fall.

  At Emily’s house, I can’t do this. At Emily’s, I must be strong and solid, the person they can depend on to keep life ticking along. There, I can cook, clean, drive Chloe around, field unwanted phone calls, see off doorstep reporters, run the gauntlet of the weekly supermarket shop. I can listen quietly, give approval, make gentle suggestions, empty the laundry basket, discreetly fold Daisy’s clean baby clothes and slip them away. I can put out the empty milk bottles, open up my arms for needful embraces, switch off the TV when the inevitable news updates appear. But I can’t cry. To do so would be cruel, self-indulgent, when James and Emily have lost so much. Of course, I am heartbroken too at the loss of Daisy; that precious child inhabits my every waking thought. But I don’t have the right to show my grief. Not in the face of Emily, who conceived Daisy, gave birth to her, held her to her breast as an infant, and hadn’t yet even seen her take her first tottering steps. To cry would be an insult. She needs protecting as much as possible, when she has so much to bear.

  I think about the phone call from Sammie yesterday afternoon. Apart from a few brief words at the funeral, she and Emily have barely seen each other since their teens, and Emily said it herself: she’s fed up with all these “friends” calling to get the latest gossip on the case, to draw themselves into the drama of it all. Sammie means well, of course—she’d seen the TV appeal and wanted to see if we were all OK. She did ask to speak to Emily too, to let her know she was there for her if she needed anything, anything at all. And I told her, thank you, it will mean a lot, and I’ll pass it on, but not to expect a return call straightaway because Emily’s not in much of a state to talk at the moment. Sammie said she’d try again in a week or so, and I told her it was probably best if she waited for Emily to call, when she was ready. I hope she wasn’t too upset by my fobbing her off, especially after everything she did for me around my mum’s funeral, putting me up when I had nowhere else to go. She’s a precious friend, but the family needs shielding, and I’ll do whatever it takes to protect them from more hurt.

  I narrow my eyes at the red-pink horizon, willing my mind to clear, to move momentarily away from the nightmare of the here and now. But it’s impossible, and I hate myself for even trying. It’s been two days since DCI Jacobs came and interviewed Chloe, since they took Max in for questioning. It seems an age away now, and in that time, it feels like the fractures in the family have deepened, with each of them retreating to their chosen corners of the house, into their own private state of misery. Emily is popping pills like there’s no tomorrow, and I am certain she’s taking more than prescribed, knocking back the wine when she’s supposed to avoid alcohol altogether. But who can blame her, who can take that small comfort from her, when all she wants to do is sink into dreamless sleep to escape the dreadful reality? James is in his own private hell, masking it as best he can, making small talk with Cherry and Piper, plying them with endless hot drinks and sandwiches, treating them as much like guests as Emily treats them like visiting salesmen. The liaison officers are clearly used to this; they accept James’s hospitality for what it is—the desperate time-filling attention of a devastated father. They ask easy questions, listen to James’s concerns, making notes and following up on any queries the family might have. They liaise. Chloe, for now grounded from leaving the house—even for school—only leaves her room to fetch food or use the bathroom. I’ve been popping in and out of her bedroom to check on her, but now she’s even uncommunicative with me, who she usually sees as an ally. I know she’s finding it hard to forgive me for blowing the whistle on Max, but I didn’t have any choice, d
id I? I would never have betrayed her trust, but Daisy’s disappearance has changed everything. When James found that key to be missing, the police had to know, didn’t they? After all, I wasn’t foolish enough to think that I wasn’t still under some kind of suspicion myself, and if the missing key was enough to give the police another lead, then I had to let them know. If there was any chance—however remote—that it could bring Daisy back, Chloe’s secret had to come out. I’ve told her this, and I know the rational, caring part of her understands; I know she’ll come around to me again.

  How do the police ever get to the bottom of these things, I wonder, when everyone lies so routinely? Look at Chloe, how effortlessly she told DCI Jacobs she wasn’t sleeping with her boyfriend, even embellishing the untruth by saying he was “respectful” of her age. I was in the kitchen when the interview was going on, but the door remained open, and in the frozen silence of the house I heard every word spoken. Perhaps she would have found it harder to lie if I had been in the room, if she had had to look at me. Me, who sat down with her after that first encounter with Max, who asked her if she was being careful. “Careful?” she had repeated, knowing exactly what I meant. “You don’t want to get pregnant, Chloe,” I’d replied. There was no point in being anything other than direct in these matters. She had laughed, and after I’d finally got the truth out of her—that they’d been sleeping together for a couple of months already—I persuaded her to let me take her to the family planning center to get checked out and arrange some reliable form of contraception. She begged me not to tell her parents. “Emily will literally kill me,” she had fretted, as we left the clinic, a white pharmacy packet secreted in her school rucksack. “Believe me, Chlo,” I’d replied, “I’ve got more to worry about on that front than you. I think Emily would kill me first.” We had laughed, and hugged, and never spoke another word about it again.

  Maybe some secrets are best kept. I don’t know; I’m no expert on the matter. When it comes to secrets and lies, sometimes I worry I’m so full of them that one day they’ll just come spilling out of me, in such a rush of shame and torment that they’ll wash my new life away, Chloe and all.

  * * *

  I was seventeen when it happened, and yet when I think back on it, I remember myself as so much younger than Chloe seems now at fifteen. Was it because of my heart condition and the kid gloves my parents used to handle me after I’d started having my episodes? Or was I just naturally quieter, shyer, less bold than others? It was something that came up at every parents’ evening—the teachers’ coaxing suggestions that I should be more ambitious, put my hand up more, be more like Emily. It was impossible to avoid the comparisons; we were in the same class, after all, Emily one of the eldest, me, the youngest. I was smaller, quieter, less visible all around—and to be frank, I was perfectly happy that way. “We can’t all be in charge,” Emily once told me as I sat cross-legged in our shared bedroom, following her instructions to line up our soft toys in tidy classroom rows as she set up her miniature teacher’s desk. “It would be chaos if we all tried to be in charge.” She must have been eight or so at the time. What kind of eight-year-old uses the word “chaos”? But she was right we couldn’t all be in charge. Emily and I had always been treated more like twins than sisters, and with less than a year between us, that was how we behaved. I was the subordinate ape to her silver-backed gorilla. And I was fine with that; Emily’s extroversion gave welcome shade to my quiet ways.

  It carried on this way right into our teens, and when Emily worked out that I was pregnant she kept it to herself for a week or more, her rage bubbling deep, before she finally confronted me on a rainy Tuesday morning as I got ready for college. Despite my remorse and fear—and my abject terror of what the future might hold for me now—I remember a tiny part of me thinking, She doesn’t like it when I do something first, no matter how awful that thing is. And she doesn’t like it when I keep secrets.

  She was waiting for me when I got out of the shower, sitting on my bed, her hands folded neatly on her lap.

  “Bloody hell, Ems! You scared the life out of me.” I nearly dropped my towel at the sight of her, but my startled smile quickly faded when I saw the hard line of her mouth, the seething shine of her eyes.

  The party loomed large in my mind—both the bits I remembered and the bits I did not—and I’d known right from the start, deep in my gut, that things could never be the same again between my sister and me. How could they be? When terrible things like that happen, they change the way you look at the world, the way you look at each other, and you’re altered permanently, with no hope of return to the state of life before. Our relationship had been strained for weeks, ever since the party, ever since that horrible, terrifying blank hole that opened up around me at Sammie’s house. At the time, we’d been over it again and again, Emily worrying away at it like a child at a scabby knee, demanding that I try harder to remember the exact sequence of events that night, to remember what really happened in the bedroom while she was dancing with Sammie and the others downstairs. The fact that I couldn’t recall any of it didn’t take away my grotesque sense of disgust at what must have occurred while I was absent from myself—and still, night after night, I would wake, my breath caught in my throat, the helpless sensation of being paralyzed overwhelming me, threatening to send me under.

  But how could I explain any of this to Emily? She wouldn’t believe me, didn’t believe me. As far as she was concerned, I was to blame for what happened that night. “You’re a tease,” she had said again, the morning after the party, talking to my back as I stood at the kitchen worktop making tea with shaking hands. “You give off this virginal, not-interested vibe, Jessica, but all the time you’re loving the attention.” She was leaning up against the kitchen table, the stains of last night’s mascara still streaked down her cheeks.

  “What attention?” I had whispered through my tears, still not turning to face her. “I never wanted any of his attention.”

  “Well, you got it!” she’d hissed, and for several weeks that had been the very last thing she said to me.

  When she got mad like this, all I wanted to do was put my arms around her until she stopped thinking bad thoughts about me, and in the old days, that was just what I would have done. But not now. These days she didn’t want my arms about her; she wanted Simon’s.

  “Close the door,” she whispered now, as I stood shivering in my towel. Mum and Dad were still in the house, bumbling about, Dad getting ready for work, Mum in the kitchen taking her rotating turn at preparing the floral arrangements for weekend Mass.

  I drew my towel closer, quietly pushing the door closed behind me. I really didn’t want to be alone with her. I knew that expression; I knew I wouldn’t like what was coming. She barely moved as she spoke, and my gaze became transfixed on her lips, as the damning words flowed from her, floating into the room like black smoke.

  “So, when were you going to tell me?”

  I gawped back at her.

  Really? her expression said to me. Really, you’re going to deny it? She jerked her chin toward my belly, the movement aggressive, disgusted. “You’re pregnant,” she said simply.

  I couldn’t speak. I just couldn’t speak, and I crumpled to my knees, pulling my towel tighter, my sense of nakedness suddenly overwhelming. I shook my head—I wasn’t denying it but trying to shake it away, to expel this horror from my thoughts. To give it words was to give it life.

  “You’re trying to tell me it’s not true?” Her words came out incredulous, a nasty scoff punctuating the question. “Jessica—I know you better than anyone knows you—better than you know yourself. Do you think I haven’t noticed the change in you? The nibbled breakfasts. The pale skin, the shaky hands in the morning—the dry-heaving in the bathroom. My room’s right next door, for God’s sake. I can hear everything!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. It was all I could think of. It was what I thought she needed to hear, though I’d said it a hundred times since that dreadful night, wh
en she’d dragged me out of that room and away from the party, mortified at the behavior of her pathetic little sister, her sister who gets into God knows what state and shows her up and lets her down. Her little sister who spoils everything. “I’m sorry,” I said again, because there was nothing else available to me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  Beyond my bedroom door, Mum was saying good-bye to Dad on the front step, something she’d done every morning since I could remember, a strangely formal ritual that seemed to belong in the 1940s: he in his shapeless gray solicitor’s suit, she in her pinafore.

  “Will you look at me, Jess?” The hard edge in Emily’s voice had softened. “Jess?”

  I hadn’t realized I was crying until this moment, and I wiped the palm of my hand across my face. The action felt dragged out, like a film run in slow motion.

  “So I take it that it happened there? At the party? Unless you’d been at it before then too—” Her words stung—they were intended to, suggesting I was some cheap slut who slept with anyone who came her way. How could she even think it? Before that night, I’d never even kissed a boy.

  I gasped. “I—I haven’t—it’s—” There were no words to convey what I wanted to say, the shame and fear I felt.

  Emily’s face was starting to harden again, her hate for me expanding in the face of my cowardly blustering.

  “Yes,” I said, defeated. “It was that night. But, Emi, I don’t remember a thing!”

  In a rush, she was on the floor beside me, her arms encircling my bare shoulders, her face pressed into my damp hair, and she was crying and rocking me, and I never wanted her to let me go.

  “It’s OK, Jess,” she whispered into my neck. “I’m here for you. I’m sorry I’m so hard on you, but you can’t go on pretending nothing’s happened, can you? We’ll get this sorted, OK? We’ll get this all sorted, and no one ever needs to find out about it.”