Here she is again, alone, waiting for the others to come home. Is this the way the future looks for Emily – forever waiting? Forever waiting for news of Daisy; for James to come home? In the midst of this latest drama James had hardly looked at her, hadn’t taken the time to notice how attractive she looked and the effort she had made. Maybe she didn’t look attractive; maybe he has no interest in her whatsoever. The meal he thinks she cooked will spoil in the oven, because she won’t turn it off or cover it with foil, just so she can make the point when he returns home. The hoped-for ambience Jess has been working on all afternoon has vanished entirely.
The moment James told them about Chloe, Jess had grabbed her coat and keys, directing him to get straight in the car. ‘You can’t drive, James. You’ve just had a big glass of wine. Will you be OK, Ems? I think you should stay here, in case there’s any news about Daisy.’
Emily had nodded mutely. How could she argue with that?
‘Ems? Is that OK? We’ll give you a ring when we get there. Let you know what’s going on.’
Emily noticed the tender way Jess rested her hand on James’s back, urging him out of the door, snatching up his coat and pushing it into his confused paw. Was it possessive, the way Jess touched him? Or was it a mothering motion? It must be the latter, surely, when Jess has gone to so much effort to help Emily today, helping her get ready and setting up this romantic meal, as farcical as it might seem now. She is bewildered; she has no idea what she feels – about James or Jess or any of this. On reflection, it seems odd that Jess hadn’t suggested that she, Emily, might want to join them at the hospital. She is, after all, Chloe’s stepmother. She has more right to be at her bedside than Jess, who’s not been in her life more than five minutes. But maybe Jess only plans to drop James there, to wait in the car while he finds out what’s going on. Maybe she was just being practical, taking control of the situation when James and Emily looked unlikely to do so. Who knows? Emily stares across the room into the silent space of the family kitchen, a room previously unaccustomed to the quiet that inhabits it now. Who the fuck knows?
She picks up the bottle James left on the counter and pours wine into his used glass. At least this time there’s no doubt it’s all Chloe’s fault. The name spikes into Emily’s thoughts. Always bloody Chloe.
After the first glass she picks up the phone and calls Becca, knowing it will block the line when Jess tries to call her from the hospital, but suddenly not giving a damn.
‘Becca?’ she says as soon as her friend picks up. ‘It’s me, Emily. Is it a good time? I just really need to talk to someone –’
Becca tries to reply, but Emily talks over her, ignoring the clatter of the busy restaurant in the background.
‘I don’t know who else to turn to – I’m at my wits’ end, and there’s still no news of Daisy –’ she refills her glass ‘– and James and Jess have just been called out to the hospital, where Chloe’s having her stomach pumped.’
‘God, Emily!’ Becca gasps, the change in background noise suggesting she’s stepped into the back room. ‘That’s awful. What happened? Is she going to be all right?’
Becca sounds so genuinely concerned that it occurs to Emily that this thought hasn’t even entered her mind. Will Chloe be all right? She supposes so, but she’s been so busy feeling rage at the girl’s latest disaster that she hasn’t even thought about the reality of the situation.
‘Of course she will!’ Emily replies with a snort. ‘She’s just trying to get attention. Probably got pissed out of her mind on cheap vodka. She’s trying to show us she’s the boss – sleeping with her boyfriend, staying out all night, getting drunk – she’s just playing up. She hates it that all the attention is on Daisy. It’s shocking, to be honest, Becca. I hate to say it, but she’s a spoilt little cow.’
There’s silence at the other end of the phone, and Emily knows she’s crossed the line. Becca has known Chloe since she was tiny, ever since they first met at playgroup when Chloe and Todd were just tots. Becca’s always said how fond she is of Chloe, what a sweet girl she is.
Eventually Becca speaks, her tone now laced with stilted formality. ‘I’m going to have to go, Emily,’ she says. ‘The restaurant’s full tonight and we’re short-staffed. Give my best to James, will you? Tell him we’ll stop by to see Chloe when she’s feeling up to it.’ And she rings off, leaving Emily staring at the wine glass on the worktop, the message behind Becca’s words confirming what she already knows about herself: she’s the worst person in the world.
Her thoughts return to that image of Jess’s hand on James’s back. There was always something about Jess that made people feel good. She was quiet, and so you had the sense that she was listening, really listening to what you were saying and feeling. When you meet someone like that, it makes you feel good. It makes you feel interesting and important and understood. Emily knows this as well as anyone – Jess was her counsellor, her confidante, her best friend since the earliest age, and she was the one person Emily would always turn to for support, the one person who would never judge her, never betray her trust. When they were little – in fact through most of their childhood together – Emily had trusted her implicitly, in many ways thinking of Jess as an extension of herself – the better, quieter, kinder version of herself. Strangely, these were the qualities which could provoke jealousy in her too, when she allowed herself to wish she were more like Jess, more likeable like Jess.
Before they separated, Emily had never known Jess to have a boyfriend, and, as their subsequent sixteen adult years were spent apart, she’s never seen her sister in any kind of partnership at all. That’s strange, isn’t it? she thinks. To have only known your sister as a child – and then later, as an adult, solitary, with no apparent baggage to drag along. In their teens, Emily had lots of boyfriends, most of them only lasting a couple of weeks or so, and the awkwardly shy Jess tried to steer clear of these boys if Emily brought them home or they bumped into each other around town or school. Jess would be polite, say a friendly hello, raising her doe eyes to linger on them momentarily before spiriting herself away, too uneasy to stick around and say more. And Emily, so vivacious and certain of her own Snow White charm, would watch jealously as her latest crush darted furtive glances at her retreating sister, eyes hungrily following the pretty little mouse as she scuttled from view. And she was mousy, wasn’t she? That was what Emily would tell herself in those moments of envy, gazing after Jess with her browny-gold hair and grungy attire. She might be pretty, but she wasn’t sophisticated like Emily; she wasn’t fun like Emily. Who would choose Jess over Emily?
‘You’re a tease,’ she had once told Jess, after a particularly stupid boyfriend of three weeks had dumped her, then had the cheek to ask if she’d find out whether her sister wanted to go out with him. She had been incensed by the nerve of him, and she’d marched home from the swimming baths where it had happened, running over the times and places they’d encountered Jess, working herself up to the conclusion that her sister’s shyness was in fact a form of passive flirtation designed to steal the limelight from her older, more popular sister. Jess had been helping Dad in the garden at the time, wearing cut-off jeans and a Simpsons T-shirt, with a ridiculous thumb-width smear of soil across her forehead.
‘What?’ she had replied.
‘You’re a tease,’ Emily had repeated. ‘You try to make out you’re not interested in boys, and all the while you’re sneaking them flirty looks.’
Even as she said it, Emily knew it wasn’t true. Jess looked around, clearly mortified by the thought that Mum or Dad might have overheard. ‘But I don’t,’ was all she could muster.
‘Well, maybe you think you don’t, Jess. But trust me, you do. Take it from someone older and wiser: you ought to be careful, because you’re giving out all the wrong signals.’
Emily had sauntered away, already feeling better about the break-up with stupid Rick, only pausing briefly at the back door to look over at Jess. She was standing beside the border with a trowel in her hand, looking every bit as young as her fourteen years, an expression of panic fixed on her grubby face.
Emily is woken by the sound of the front door banging shut, her first emotion that of irritation. Jess and James enter the living room where Emily has been dozing, closely followed by a dough-skinned Chloe, whose expression sits somewhere between shamefaced and sullen.
‘You said you’d phone me.’ Emily directs her accusation at Jess.
Jess glances at James. ‘I did try, but the line was busy. And your mobile’s been switched off for days.’
James puts his arm around Chloe, but when he looks at Emily his face is annoyed. ‘Aren’t you going to ask Chloe how she is?’
‘Sorry, yes,’ Emily replies, rising from the sofa, shaking her head. ‘Sorry. I’ve been worried, that’s why I’m a bit cranky. How are you, Chloe?’ She approaches her stepdaughter and embraces her, but Chloe is not yielding; she takes the hug like a tree resisting a strong wind.
‘Fine,’ Chloe mutters. ‘My throat hurts.’
Jess extends a hand towards Chloe, and Emily feels cross when Chloe readily takes it, following her ‘aunt’ out into the kitchen to fetch a cold drink.
The living room feels like a strange place, still decked out for Christmas, the huge tree now wilting and bare in the corner, the tree that James and Jess put up with the girls all those weeks ago while Emily lay in bed with a headache. She remembers lying beneath the covers in her darkened room upstairs, the pain in her temple throbbing like a heartbeat, feeling grateful at the sound of their distant laughter as they unpacked the decorations and sang along to Boney M’s 20 Greatest Christmas Songs. They must have made a night of it, because in the morning Emily found two empty wine bottles on the side, the Christmas cheese and biscuits half devoured, and she’d had to stop her jealous alter ego from rearing up, enticing her to imagine all sorts of goings-on between her sister and her husband after the girls had gone to bed.
But even then Jess had been helping out more than she needed to, stepping in to lighten Emily’s load, finding ways to make life easier for them all. She’s a good sister. Since New Year, James and Jess have been trying to persuade Emily that it’s time to take the Christmas decorations down, but she won’t have it, not until Daisy is back home, not until this is all over. It’s creepy, she acknowledges to herself now, the way she’s saving it like some kind of shrine to her missing child, and the decay of the thing grows more disturbing to her with every passing day. But to take it down now would surely be to accept defeat, to accept that she might never come home? How Daisy adored the tree, with its angel on top! James would lift her high above his head to kiss the angel on the face, and then she’d rest in his arms as she pointed out every one of her favourite decorations for James to name. ‘Big Santa. Shiny Robin. Sparkly Reindeer. Little Dog. Stripy Stocking.’ She’d even started to form some of the words herself. ‘Diney Oh’in.’ That was her version of ‘Shiny Robin’. The health visitor thought she was going to be an early talker, because she was ahead of her peers with all sorts of vocal cues, though she was a bit behind with the crawling and walking. Emily looks around the room, at the desiccated tree and its dropped needles, at the wizened mistletoe that hangs above the hearth, and wonders if Daisy has learnt any new words in the past fortnight. She hopes that woman – Avril – is talking to her enough. Daisy likes it when you talk to her a lot.
‘What did the doctors say?’ Emily asks James, for want of anything else to say. When did she get to feel so awkward in the company of her own husband? Ha! Even that’s a laugh: husband.
He gazes through the door in the direction that Chloe and Jess have gone. ‘Classic alcohol poisoning – nothing else. No drugs, as far as they could tell. Chloe hasn’t said much about it, except that she just wanted to “blot it all out”. She just wanted to forget everything for a while.’
Emily nods, incapable of coming up with anything worth saying. James makes a move to leave the room, clearly feeling as uncomfortable as her, when he stops in the doorway, an afterthought.
‘One of the nurses on duty … she said something that worried me a bit.’ He turns to look at Emily full on. ‘She said that when Chloe was first brought in this evening she was crying hysterically, rambling on about her sister Daisy. The nurse wanted to know who Daisy was – I think she thought there might be another teenager out there in the same state – and of course I had to explain who we were.’
Emily stares at James, wishing he would get to the point.
‘I asked the nurse if she could remember Chloe’s exact words, and she told me she’d just said the same thing over and over again: It’s all my fault. It’s my fault Daisy has gone. It’s all my fault.’