Daisy Johnson
The room my sister dies in smells of hot water bottles and the salt we secretly scatter into the corners and in front of the door. We wait, that winter, for the snow. My sister is in the room she dies in for nearly two years. She likes to make jokes about how her body is starting to look like the sheets she lies under. A joke that isn’t really a joke. Our mum’s hands take on a metallic sheen, a mechanised twitch: she changes the IV and pops the packets of pills and bends to see to the catheter. Every day on the news that final winter the weatherperson says snow is coming and every day we sit waiting for it in that big, illness-overflowing bed. I am fourteen years old. My sister is eighteen. Before she was sick we had hated one another. Broken one another’s things, bruised and scratched and did damage to each other’s bodies. That winter we sit in the bed side by side and watch animated films on the laptop and listen to the sound of our mum moving in the rooms downstairs. My sister’s attention span is short as a struck match and her legs burn if she stays in one position too long. I make her soup from the cartons in the fridge and carry it up the stairs spattering and boiling my bare arms and we watch The Lion King and The Incredibles and Moana. The light through the window often makes it seem like the snow has come while we were distracted; cold, hard light on our thin-skinned faces and my sister’s tiny arms. We watch The Snowman. We watch The Snowman five or six times a day. I try to suggest other things, but my sister gets angry and anguished and snaps the way she used to and we watch The Snowman. Do you know the story? It is nearly Christmas and there is snow like the snow we dream will come. A boy builds a snowman and in the night it comes alive. The introduction goes: I remember that winter because it had brought the heaviest snow I had ever seen. My sister loves it. I dream that I build something in the garden for her and in the night it comes alive. We wait for snow. My mum goes out and comes back with a Christmas tree so tall it can barely get through the door. Together we yell and hustle and bash it up the stairs and into my sister’s room. She watches us suspiciously. We load the branches down with ornaments and homemade reindeer made out of years-hardened cookies and strange paper shapes from when we were young and that look like nothing and curl at the edges.
My sister says, it isn’t Christmas.
But it is Christmas. It will be Christmas in two days and we will sit around her bed and eat turkey from a packet and tiny spring rolls. My mum drags over a chair and stands teetering to put the star on the top. My sister looks at me. I can see her pulse beating in ten or fifteen places on her body. When she first got sick we believed in everything there was to believe in. I left piles of salt around the room and we crushed our hands together and made wish after wish. I left a bulb of garlic in a milky bowl beneath the bed until the smell got too much, and wrote messages on screwed-up bits of paper that I hid around the room and sometimes we stayed awake all night seeing if that would shake the sickness right out of her bones.
Later I will be drawn to relationships with people who do not need me, will not meet my friends, will ignore my phone calls, won’t notice when I am so low, so dog-dark, that I cannot see the leaves for the trees.
Ileave our mum doing the tree and my sister watching her and I go out into the garden. It has been days, perhaps weeks, since I have been outside. I can feel my insides humming to the tune of the air. The ground is sodden and so muddy my shoes are overcome and I have to stomp back for boots. It is cold. It is colder even than it looks and I put on gloves and my mum’s hat and another pair of socks from the radiator. I walk down to the bottom of the garden and out onto the lane beyond. There is the staticky hum of traffic not far away and the buzz of someone’s television. After my sister dies we will move to a smaller house in a city and I will go to a school where no one knows I even had a sister who believed what I made her could stop her from dying. Do you see how time bends and won’t stay still, how uselessly it holds us?
I climb the stile of the first field I come to and walk along the bare furrows. It feels like years since I have walked here and perhaps it is. We used to have a dog when we were younger, a terrier who bit but who loved to run and never managed to catch a rabbit. We would walk the dog here. I imagine him ahead of me, the flash of white, ears flattened with speed. I walk from one end of the field to the other and then back again. Everything is marshy and dead. I walk from one end of the field to the other and then back again and as I go I start picking up things from the ground. I find a blueish stone the shape of an arrow and a bundle of twigs meshed together with hair and a mud-filled pen. Soon I start picking without even really looking at what I’m doing. Occasionally I think I feel something on my bent face and look up at the white-sheet sky that smells of snow but there is never any there. I pick up dirty stones by the handful and clods of mud and thin weeds and put them in my pockets. At the pine tree I take off my gloves and scrape at the rough trunk with my fingernails and tear at some of the lower branches. In the garden I dig for a while with my bare hands until I find some of the bulbs mum had planted in the summer, some of the old shrivelled potatoes we hadn’t managed to find. I look up to the window of her bedroom thinking I might see my sister there, watching me. But the window is empty, the curtains drawn.
I squat down. I squash the clods of earth together and add handfuls of the soft dirt, pressing and mashing with my hands until I have something roundish. I press the stones—the blue stone at the centre—into the mud and stick in the twigs, the balls of hair, the sticky bits of weed, the scrapings from the trunk of the pine and the green needles. My fingers are bleeding a little from grappling with the pine trunk and the blood goes in too. I stand back to see what I have done. It is an odd, squat, nearly formless, unevenly balanced little creature. Not quite right.
In the house I go quietly. I can feel the mud hardening on my hands and face, even in my hair. The pockets of my coat are slick with dirt and my boots are caked. Thinking of the snowman I look for something belonging to my sister on the coatrack, a scarf or hat, but there is nothing. I can hear my mum moving around in the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher, the radio on low. The house feels like it is waiting for something. I am waiting too. I am waiting waiting waiting. In the sitting room I sift through the piles of books, hunt beneath the sofa, look in the drawers of the dresser. If it wakes now it will not be ready. Surely she has touched everything at some point. Surely everything in the house belongs to her, too. I take a pillow from the sofa and then put it back down. I can hear my mum; she will come in soon to make up the fire or watch something on the television. I go quickly towards the back door and out into the cold. My sister used to love stories of apocalyptic winters, a freeze hard enough to stop a body in its tracks. Here it is. A cold vast enough to cut us loose. I stand on one foot and pull off my boot, tug at the muddy sock. It is mine. It will have to do. I push it into the side of the shape until it is hidden. I look up at the window. I want her to come see me, standing there.
Inside mum says, what have you done? Why are you so dirty?
The sides of the bath become slicked with black, the water leaves a tideline as it drains, the plughole blocks and blocks again.
In the night I make the herbal tea she likes and go to see her. She is not asleep. The light from the laptop takes her face and makes it strange. I watch the end of The Little Mermaid with her. I watch her mouthing the words. I hold the tea up to her face when it is cool enough to drink. When she is done I tell her what I have made for her. I watch her eyes on my mouth. I point to the window.
I do not help her because she would not want me to. We are still partly enemies even though everything is different than it was before. There are stains on her thick pyjamas and she is so thin it looks like she might easily flash and be gone. I do not think she would leave any trace of herself behind. She walks slowly, as if just learning how to do so. She has her hands out in front of her. If she fell I would not be close enough to catch her but I do not move any nearer. The moon is thick and clotted, hearty enough she will be able to see down onto the garden. She clutches the sill and leans forward so that her nose nearly touches the glass.
It’s moving, she says.
My throat and mouth feel full of cotton. I press my hands down against my belly until it hurts and bite my tongue hard. It’s moving, I can see it, she says. Can you see it? She asks, but I do not go closer to look. I do not go closer to look and she does not come away from the window. I do not know how long we stand there. On Christmas day we eat turkey from a packet and tiny spring rolls off plates on our laps. We watch The Night Before Christmas and our mum laughs so hard she spills her wine onto my sister’s white duvet. I think of the end of The Snowman when the boy goes out into the garden and finds the snowman he made has melted away. I do not look out of the window. I do not look out of the window or go to the front door and open it and look down the slope of the garden. We eat Christmas cake and leave the tree lights on all day. When I am older my mum and I go out for Christmas every year, eat in restaurants or cafes, even—a few times—find the only cinemas that are open and have nachos and popcorn for dinner. Sometimes, in the city, I think that I see the creature I made for my sister. Down alleys or on the opposite platform just as a train comes in, or in the windows of other people’s houses. In the windows of other people’s houses.