by Nicole Trope
It took me ten minutes to creep out of the house because I kept expecting my mother to wake up and stop me, but finally, I was outside in the heavy, humid air. I lifted my head and felt the slightest of breezes. I could smell the jasmine in the air.
I started walking. I needed to get to a road, a big road, a road where there would be a lot of people and cars no matter how late it was. I knew it couldn’t be both of us who got saved. I was old enough to speak. I would be forced to tell people my name and address and then back we would go. It couldn’t be both of us.
I kept walking with Lilly getting heavier and heavier, our bodies stuck together in the warm, dark night. It felt like I had been walking forever. I expected someone to stop me, someone older and stronger than I was to rush out of their home and stop me, ask me what was wrong. I wished for someone to stop me but no one did, and I walked on, more determined. No one was ever coming to help us. I had to save Lilly myself.
I stumbled once, twice, and Lilly woke up just as I heard the swish of traffic on the road ahead of us.
‘Down,’ she demanded and I let her walk, watched her flinch as her soft feet encountered stones and scraps of rubbish at the side of the road. I wished I had thought to bring her one and only pair of shoes, small for her already but better than nothing. She held my hand, walking silently, patiently next to me, not complaining. Her frog was in her other hand, grinning madly, his beady eyes shining wildly whenever we were near a streetlight.
We stepped out from a small side street onto the big road, the road that would have cars soon but was, just for a moment, empty. I pulled Lilly over to a bush at the edge of the road. ‘Ow sore,’ she said, sitting down. I looked at her little foot and brushed away some small stones, placing a gentle kiss on her dusty skin.
Two cars raced past us, their lights illuminating the bush we were crouched in, the curious look on Lilly’s face as she wondered what we were doing out, the little foot I was holding.
Lilly held her frog tight and sucked her thumb, happy and safe because she was with me. A truck rumbled by and I felt the noise of it rattle inside me. I knew that I shouldn’t be out with Lilly, so close to a main road. I should have been home and safe in my bed, but home wasn’t a safe place, not for me… and soon not for Lilly either.
I watched the truck disappear into the distance and then all was silent. ‘Come, Lilly,’ I said and I dragged her out onto the side, visible to all who would come down the big road.
‘Home,’ she replied. She didn’t want to be out anymore. But she could never go back. I knew that.
The road was empty and I knew I wasn’t going to get another chance. I grabbed the frog from her and threw him as far as I could.
Lilly screamed, ‘No, no!’
‘Go get him, Lills,’ I said, holding back my tears. ‘Go get Foggy.’
She took off at a run and I hid in some bushes at the side, crouched down, folded myself up.
My little sister picked up Foggy, dusty from the road, and looked around her, her little face crumpled. ‘Li, Li,’ she called. I put my hand against my mouth, biting down hard on the clammy flesh to stop myself from answering her, my heart aching at not being able to.
She sat down on the side of the road and cried and called for her big sister. I bit harder into my hand, taking comfort from the pain I was causing myself, stifling my sobs. ‘Please,’ I prayed, ‘please someone help.’
Lilly cried for a long time and then she grew tired of crying and sat staring at the road.
I waited and waited. I wouldn’t move until I knew my sister was safe.
Finally, she started walking, back to where she thought I was. My body cramped, my heart broke at my own cruelty. She walked right by me, sniffing and occasionally saying, ‘Li, Li.’
She was sad and lonely, lost and afraid, and she needed her big sister, but I knew she needed to be away from her terrible family even more. I didn’t believe in God, not anymore, but crouching in the bushes I prayed desperately. ‘Please let someone come and find her, please I beg you, I’ll let him do anything he wants to me just please let someone come.’
And finally, someone came. A car had gone past Lilly. She was far away from me when it happened and I could only just make her out under the streetlights, holding tightly onto Foggy. The car screeched on brakes and reversed, and then a woman got out and swayed over to Lilly. She looked very young and like she’d been drinking, and I almost stood up to snatch her away. She needed a good home, not another drunk mother, but the girl said, ‘We need to call the police,’ and I felt my body relax. She held out her hand and Lilly, having no choice and no one to turn to, took it. I watched her walk towards the car. Lilly said, ‘Ow sore,’ again and the girl reached down and picked her up. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered and I closed my eyes. I opened them again to see Lilly arching back in the girl’s arms. ‘Foggy!’ she shouted. ‘Foggy, Foggy!’
‘Shush, kid, I’m trying to help you.’
I watched her little hand open and close desperately and saw where she was looking. On the ground lay her stuffed toy. She had dropped Foggy.
The girl didn’t turn around. She didn’t look back. She climbed into the car, which I could see was a shiny red under the streetlight, a silver H on the bonnet. ‘“H” is for Honda,’ I whispered. I remembered my father teaching me the alphabet, pointing out cars we drove past. ‘A’ is for Audi, ‘B’ is for BMW. ‘H’ is for Honda, I knew. ‘A red Honda,’ I repeated, holding onto the last time I would ever see my sister. In a moment the car was gone, roaring away into the night, my little sister safe inside.
I crept out of the bush, picked up the frog and held it to me. I comforted myself that at least she was safe – or so I thought until the news report. I watched that night – to be sure, to be certain – and that’s when I found out. She wasn’t safe. I had made a mistake. All I saw was the car – the shiny red car. The shiny red car, crumpled and broken, the H glinting in the sun. ‘A young man and a young woman,’ the reporter said. ‘An unrestrained toddler in the back,’ the reporter said. ‘I didn’t know her boyfriend had a child,’ the mother of the young woman said. I knew whose child it was. At least, I thought I knew.
I trudged home after I left her, my heart broken, my soul heavy. She was the only thing I truly loved, the only thing that mattered, and now she was gone.
At home I climbed into bed and slept and slept because I finally understood why my mother needed to sleep so much.
There was no reason to wake up, no reason at all.
Forty-Eight
Now
Molly
* * *
Molly shivers despite her warm coat. It’s the last week of winter, and the intensity of the cold snap has taken everyone by surprise, making spring seem very far away. This morning, as she waited for Alice to pick her up, her phone told her it was only three degrees outside. The wind seems determined to push her off her feet and force its way into even the tiniest gaps in her clothing.
‘We should have done this another day,’ says Alice.
‘Who knew the weather was going to turn like it has?’ replies Molly.
‘Are you sure you’re warm enough?’
‘I’m fine,’ Molly says, smiling, ‘stop fussing.’
Alice laughs. ‘I’m making up for lost time. Come on, it’s just down this path.’
The two women lower their heads down against the wind and trudge forward.
‘Here,’ says Alice, ‘just here.’
The wind quite suddenly dies down and a weak sun emerges from behind clouds. The cemetery is silent and empty except for the two sisters. Large evergreen trees block out the small slices of sun as it struggles through the clouds. Molly looks up and down the rows of gravestones in black and grey granite. Some of them are empty but some are covered in flowers, wilting and blowing in the wind. ‘Beloved mother and grandmother,’ Molly reads. ‘Much-loved wife and sister,’ she sees on another.
Molly sweeps her eyes across the manicured green lawns. Everyone
else has stayed home, safely cocooned from the cold weather. Margaret’s grave is at the end of a long row, the second last grave. Next to her a fresh mound of earth tells of another family and another loss.
Alice stares down at the simple white headstone. The inscription ‘Margaret Henkel’ is followed by her date of birth and the date of her death. Unlike many of the other stones the two women have passed, there is no mention of her being a wife or a mother or a grandmother. There are no loving words or lines of poetry, just the bare bones of when she was born and when she died.
‘I was going to write beloved wife and mother,’ says Alice, ‘but when the time came it felt like the wrong thing to do. I didn’t know if I would ever come back to visit her, but I knew that if I did, I would probably be infuriated by those words every time I saw them.’
Molly looks at her sister, at her wide brown eyes that shine with tears. ‘Oh, love,’ she says, and she puts her arm around her shoulders, bringing them closer.
Alice shakes her head. ‘It’s weird. I didn’t think I would miss her. I mean, she wasn’t even really herself for a good few years before she died, and before that, well… she was hardly a mother at all.’
Molly and Alice have talked it all through, have discussed where Molly came from and who Margaret was over and over. Alice has explained about the news report and the accident. ‘If I hadn’t left you, you wouldn’t have been in that car. That’s all I knew – that I had left you and the girl had put you into a car and then there was an accident.’
‘You were a child,’ Molly keeps saying when they discuss it, ‘just a child.’
Despite Molly still feeling that she should have been told she was adopted, what she mostly feels is an overwhelming gratitude that she was given the chance at a life like hers, that she was saved from the trauma that Alice went through.
When she recovered from her stab wound, she was afraid for Alice, for what would happen to her, but the sisters sat together and told the police the truth. Jack had hired a lawyer to represent Alice in the interview, but in the end he was unnecessary.
‘You were a child,’ all of the constables and detectives they spoke to said. ‘You were a child and you felt you had no choice. Someone should have seen what was happening to you. Someone should have helped you. We’re sorry no one helped you. We’re sorry the system failed you.’
Detectives had, of course, wanted to question Margaret and Vernon, but Margaret was dead and Vernon in a coma, and there was no one to tell the story but Alice.
In the end, the case was closed and everyone was allowed to move on with their lives.
Alice told Molly that she thought her tears of relief, of closure after a lifetime of being broken, would never end.
* * *
Vernon never woke up from the blow to his head. He had been in a coma for weeks until hospital staff had called Molly, as his only living relative, to make the decision on whether or not to withdraw care. Ed had disappeared. He was Vernon’s nephew but he had left the country the day after Vernon had come to Alice’s house. Molly would like to speak to him, to find out more about her father and her family, but so far, he hasn’t responded to messages on Facebook. She will keep trying. She wants to know more, wants to know why he helped Vernon do such terrible things, wants to understand it. She hopes that if she understands it, she won’t be so angry about it.
‘There’s been no brain activity for weeks,’ the doctor told Molly when he called to explain what was happening with Vernon.
‘I can’t tell you what to do,’ said Molly. ‘He is my biological father only. Please do whatever you feel is right.’
They withdrew care, and a few days later, Vernon died. Molly was notified of his death but chose not to go to his funeral. Peter paid for him to be cremated. ‘You don’t have to do that,’ Molly said, ‘he was an awful man.’
‘I know but I don’t want you to ever regret not doing it, not sending him off to wherever he’s going.’
‘Hell, I imagine.’
Alice and Molly began to take tentative steps towards each other, towards a relationship that they both longed for, as Molly’s stomach grew with her child. Everyone was cautious and polite at first. Jack and Peter talked about work and sports, and Molly and Alice talked babies, but little by little the truth of Alice’s story emerged. Molly spent many hours holding her sister’s hand, weeping with her over all the pain and suffering she had endured.
Sometimes when Alice talked about the things he did, Molly felt a raging, burning anger on behalf of her sister. She hates to think it but she is glad that he’s dead. It is all he deserved. She can’t remember much about the time that she was with Margaret and Vernon, but what she mostly remembers is the feeling of fear associated with him. He hurt her, she knows he hurt her, but he hurt her beloved sister more.
‘When was I born?’ was one of the first questions Molly asked Alice.
‘On the 10th of January. You were a summer baby. You’d just turned two when I took you to the road – not that we had celebrated or anything. When is your birthday now?’
‘The 20th of February. It was the day I was given to my parents.’
Molly’s parents were overwhelmed by it all.
In the beginning they couldn’t help being afraid that Molly would embrace her new family over them, would want to be closer to her own sister than she was to Lexie. But Molly understood quickly what every mother does: there is no limit to the number of people you can embrace, no limit to how much love you can experience.
When they’d all met for the first time outside the hospital, Molly had stood back, letting Alice and her family and her parents and Lexie decide how things should go. After a few quiet minutes in Molly and Peter’s living room, Lexie had stood up and gone over to Alice. ‘Thank you for saving our sister,’ she had said, putting her arms around Alice. And just like that, the ice was broken.
* * *
Molly studies the gravestone before them. ‘I wish I remembered something about her, anything at all really, but I don’t. I mean, I don’t remember much, but sometimes I get a flash, an image that I know is from before, and it’s always of you.’
‘I was the one who took care of you.’
‘I’m sorry you had to do that. You were so young, and I’m sorry you had to take on that responsibility.’
Alice turns to look at her sister. ‘Don’t be sorry, don’t ever be sorry. I loved you more than anything in the world. You were the best reason for me to get up in the morning and the best reason to come home to that house.’
‘I don’t know how you survived it,’ Molly whispers, ‘and I feel so… so guilty that you were there alone.’
‘Don’t,’ says Alice, ‘it’s over, really over now.’
The wind picks up again and the women stand in silence, staring down at the gravestone. Molly folds her hands over her growing bump.
‘I felt a kick last night,’ she tells Alice with a smile.
‘Oh, how wonderful,’ says Alice. ‘Did Peter feel it too?’
‘He did.’ Molly laughs. ‘We were reading in bed and I felt like… bubbles inside me, I guess. At first, I thought it was my stomach gurgling but they came again and I realised what it was. I just burst into tears and Peter didn’t know what was wrong. I was crying so hard that I couldn’t explain so I just grabbed his hand and put it on my belly and then it happened again.’
‘I am so happy for you,’ says Alice, grinning back at her sister. ‘I remember the first time I felt Isaac kick. It was the first time he became real to me, really real.’
‘I wish I could just enjoy it. I wish I wasn’t so afraid all the time.’
‘It’s going to be fine, Molly. I promise it’s going to be fine.’
Molly feels her sister beside her, a little taller than she is but with the same shaped face and the same colour hair, and she marvels at the changes the last few months have brought to her life.
She could never have imagined finding out she was adopted and then being lucky
enough to find her sister. The awful truth about her father and who he was is not something she dwells on too much. Who her parents were and how they treated her and her sister wakes her from sleep some nights as long-ago images of two lost little girls insert themselves into her dreams, but she tries to not think about Vernon during the day.
‘Do you think…’ she begins once they are both back in Alice’s car and out on the road. Then she falls silent, unsure of how to ask her sister the question that has begun to take up space in her mind.
‘Do I think…?’ prompts Alice.
‘Do you think it’s possible that I’ll be a mother like her? I mean, I’m part of her and part of him, and they were both so… I wonder sometimes what I’ve inherited from them.’
Molly has asked this question of her mother and Lexie in the weeks since she got out of the hospital, unable to shake off the awful thought.
‘That’s not possible,’ Lexie has told her. ‘It’s just not who you are.’
‘It won’t happen,’ her mother has assured her, but Molly continues to worry.
Alice doesn’t speak for a moment as she manoeuvres into a parking space outside a café that has become a favourite place for her and Molly to meet for lunch or tea.
Once she has turned off the engine, she turns to Molly, covering her sister’s hand with hers. ‘I know it worries you, love. I know because it worried me. It worried me so much I went overboard with Isaac. I wish I could tell you that everything will be fine, but motherhood can be really, really hard. There are days when it can feel like everything has been taken from you and you still have to give more. What I can tell you is that you are surrounded by people who love you, just like I was. Peter will be there and so will your parents and me. If it feels like you’re drowning, don’t just sink. We will help you stay afloat. Promise me that you’ll say something.’