As the week stretches on, Mom won’t let Aunt Irene turn on the TV, in case Kira hears about Liam Barrett on the news. She puts an Internet lock on Kira’s tablet too, which leads to Kira pleading with me to let her use mine, just for ten minutes. She whines when I say no.
On Thursday we’re supposed to hear back about Kira’s blood work but no one calls. Friday, nothing. Mom’s nervous about how much Kira is sleeping these days, nervous about the way she seems to blank out for ten to fifteen seconds at a time.
On Saturday morning, the winter sky is drab and dusky. A dull light shines through the kitchen window while the radio calls out gale warnings for all areas except Biscay, Trafalgar and FitzRoy. A fishing boat with a crew of eighteen is foundering somewhere in the Channel. High winds will batter Dover. There are fears that sea walls in London and Devon might falter. Maybe this time, maybe next time. No one knows for sure.
“God, a real tempest is brewing out there,” Mom says. She’s making pancakes for breakfast while listening to the shipping forecast, one of the things she missed most after she moved to Toronto. Kira isn’t up yet but it was cold enough in the bedroom to send me downstairs shortly after I woke. Even though I’ve put on my aunt’s thick padded slippers, my toes are still chilly.
“Has Aunt Irene already left?” I pour myself a mug of coffee, then return to the book she left on the counter for me to read. When Mom’s eyes skate over it her hand freezes. I can see her mouthing the title: The Black Death: A Personal History.
There have been intense whispered conversations between Mom and Aunt Irene since I went to New College with her, the words “A-levels” and “her education” flung back and forth between them.
“It’s nice to see you up and looking so scholarly on a Saturday.” There’s a faint edge to her words, which she tries to soften with a smile. She turns back to the pancakes so I can’t see her face. “Your aunt wanted to put in a couple of hours at work. She’ll be back by lunch, I think.”
I push my luck, hoping to coax a little enthusiasm.
“It’s pretty great that she wants me to help. It’s better than that co-op I did at Toronto East General Hospital, that was nothing but filing paperwork in an office. At least this makes me feel useful. It means something, you know?”
She looks as if she wants to object, but instead she says: “If it’ll help with your history A-levels…”
“I’ve been reading about this little town up north called Eyam.”
“Am I going to like this story?”
“It’s not so bad. In the seventeenth century, a bunch of villagers there realized they were getting sick. They set up a circle of boundary stones, which no one was supposed to cross.”
“A quarantine?”
“Uh huh. They bored holes in the rocks where they left coins soaked in vinegar to pay for bundles of food from their neighbours.”
“Why vinegar?”
“They thought it would disinfect the coins and keep everyone safe. The thing is, mostly the system worked. The quarantine, I mean.” The steam from my coffee makes a pleasant column of warmth over the cup. I take a sip. It’s bitter and burnt tasting—delicious. “They had a pretty rough time of it in Eyam, but at least the plague didn’t spread.”
Now Mom’s scooping up the pancakes and laying them out for me alongside thick rashers of bacon. “That was good of them,” she says.
“It wasn’t like all those apocalypse movies, you know? No fighting, or pillaging or anything. They didn’t all suddenly become lawless barbarians. In fact, they probably saved a lot of lives by figuring out how to take care of themselves. It’s nice to remember that people aren’t always completely savage when they’re abandoned in a bad situation. They made a decision for themselves.”
She sighs and settles herself down on the seat next to me. “Just don’t get too caught up in it, okay, sweetheart?”
“Aunt Irene says I can use it as an independent project,” I reply defensively. “I’ve been making notes.”
When I hold up my notebook, a tense look passes over her face, a tightening of her jaw. “Your aunt used to do the same thing when she was younger.”
“She told me. I thought it sounded like a good idea to have a record of all this. What’s happening.”
“But why do you need something like that? Don’t you just want to focus on other things? You’re so young, Feef, I don’t want you to worry about this. When I was your age—well. Let’s just say I had my mind on other things. Other people.”
Like Dad.
“I want to understand, that’s all.” I trace the spiral edge of the notebook. “Remember what it was like when Grammy got sick?”
It had happened when I was little. She and Dad’s mom had always been close, even when things were rough between them. When Grammy was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer Mom had a hard time coping until Dad converted the basement into a studio. He was good back then but I wonder if that was the beginning of the end, the severing of one last tie between them. Not that I thought about that much at the time. I remember I used to go down sometimes and watch her. She’d create huge collages using hundreds of images from magazines. She’d cut out the pictures, faces mostly, and layer them on top of each other until they took on a new shape, almost three-dimensional. Additive magic, she used to call it.
She made one of Grammy just before she died, when she lost her hair and her face had that gaunt, yellowish sheen. She used all sorts of old pictures, making duplicates of the ones she could find in the old albums. Mom’s collage dignified her, gave her depth—it showed something about who she had been, the part of her the disease never touched.
“Okay,” Mom says at last, relenting. “If you think it’ll help.”
The collages didn’t come with us to England. As far as I know, Dad still has them in the basement in Toronto, wrapped in plastic sheets like mummies waiting to be discovered.
“Pancakes!” Kira shrieks when she finally comes down the stairs, still rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “Soff, you should’ve come and got me.”
“And you should’ve got up when I poked you an hour ago.”
“I was tired.” She slides into the chair across from me and leans on her elbows.
“How tired were you, Kiki?” Mom asks, faux-casual.
“Just tired. I don’t know the number for how tired I was.”
But then that strange look is in Kira’s eyes again. When Mom takes Kira’s plate from the oven she won’t touch it. “I don’t want bacon like this. Why can’t we have bacon like it was back home?”
“That’s just the way they do things here.” I make a grab for her plate, which she yanks away. “C’mon, if you’re not going to eat it then I will.”
“Leave my bacon alone!” This is where we’d normally break into a comfortable sibling squabble, me poking at her, trying to tickle her sides, but the trill of the phone ringing stops us.
“Hello?” Mom’s voice changes when she answers. It’s Dr. Varghese, then. Kira glares at her plate while Mom disappears into the other room.
“Don’t touch me, Soff,” she says, “I don’t like it.”
“Sorry,” I tell her, faintly ashamed. A fog of old bruises dots her arm, the webbing of veins visible beneath. Some days her skin seems nearly translucent, like those cave fish used to darkness.
“What is it?” I ask when Mom reappears but she doesn’t answer me. She turns to Kira who’s just finished scraping her mostly untouched breakfast into the compost bin.
“Sweetheart, can you come here for a minute?”
Kira doesn’t look up. Her hands move mechanically. She puts the plate on the counter next to the sink and starts running the water.
“That was Dr. Varghese on the phone. She’s just been looking at the blood work we sent in and she’s noticed a problem. She wants you to come in for observation overnight. I know it’s a pain.”
My chest tightens.
“I don’t want to.” Kira’s voice is tense as a loaded spring.
“This isn’t about wanting, baby girl. We need to keep you healthy.”
There’s relief in Mom’s voice. Nothing definitive then, just more testing. Not that Kira is happy about it.
“I don’t care!” With a fierce swipe, Kira sends her plate crashing into the floor. She stares at the pieces on the ground. “I’m not ever going to get better. We all know that. We just keep pretending.”
Mom draws in a slow breath. Ceramic shards skitter away from me as I grab Kira’s arm.
“Don’t talk like that to Mom,” I warn her. “You just have to…” I don’t know. Her eyes are glossy with unshed tears. I tell myself I can fix this, I know I can. But this is the kid who used to do one-handed cartwheels in the backyard. She used to fly down the soccer pitch, the best player on her team. Everything she used to love is being stripped away from her.
“Let me take her out, okay? She just needs to get out of the house,” I tell Mom. Before I know it I’ve begun bundling Kira up into her waterproof jacket.
“Where are you going?” Mom demands. She won’t look at Kira, who is furiously tugging on her boots.
“Not far, I promise. We’ll come back if she gets tired. But I can get her calmed down. Just let me—”
BANG!
The door has slammed shut behind Kira. Mom’s hand wanders to her throat. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, “tell her that, Feef? I don’t want this anymore than she does.”
“I know, Mom. She knows too. She just forgets sometimes.”
“Hey, come back!” Kira’s fast but I’m faster.
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
When I grab her hand, she spins around, huffing, out of breath. “I’m not five,” she says, “I can be outside on my own.”
I hate the look of strain on her face, the dark smudges beneath her eyes. “Let me come with you. Just so Mom won’t worry.”
In a small, repentant voice, she asks: “Aren’t you mad at me? I broke a plate.”
“I’m not mad.”
“I didn’t mean what I said.”
“It’s hard for all of us, Kiki,” I tell her.
“I keep scaring everyone. I’m so sick of it! And now it’s just gonna get worse, isn’t it? What happened to Liam Barrett’s probably gonna happen to me too.”
“How do you know about that?” I ask sharply.
She looks away. “I stole your tablet.”
“You know the password?”
She shrugs.
“Kira, it doesn’t mean anything. No one thinks it means anything.”
“Jaina does. I saw her messages.”
Jesus. I take a deep breath.
“Jaina’s just being stupid. Remember when she told you that you could catch herpes from going to the toilet after Meg Cavendish? It’s the same thing. It’s just people getting scared and then doing the thing they always do when they get scared. Making stuff up to scare other people.”
She kicks at a rock and sends it skittering over the side of the bank. “Why do people do that?”
“Because it’s easier when everyone else is scared too, okay?” After she’s wiped the tears from her eyes, I ask her, “D’you want to go back?” Near the horizon rain clouds stipple the sky. I remember the shipping forecast and that storm in the Channel.
“Nuh,” she says, wiping her nose with her sleeve. “Let’s go on a bit more.”
I know why she doesn’t want to go back. Being outside feels good. It makes it easier to let the anger and resentment slip away. I don’t want to go back either, not to the endless hospital appointments, to Mom’s worry—not yet.
We follow the Thames along Fiddler’s Island, a narrow strip of land between the river and the runoff ditch. Mud sucks at our heels and green streamers of vine and thorn cling to the knotted trunks of the willows. On either side of us the waters run high, squeezing us between bank and ditch and sending off a clear, bluish spray that tastes like sweat when the wind catches it. Black clouds are starting to bully the horizon, lit from beneath with a soft, sickening yellow.
We’re a stone’s throw from the footbridge to Port Meadow when Kira stops and pulls hard on my hand.
“You okay?” For a second I think she’s stuck in the mud, maybe, or has snagged her clothes on thorns, but it isn’t that. She looks as if she’s concentrating intensely, listening for something. That blank expression, which Mom said might be a microseizure. The start of an episode. “Kira?”
Her palm is icy. Her jacket snaps as the breeze ripples across it. She doesn’t move.
And then all at once it’s as if we’re trapped inside a diving bell. In thirty seconds we’re drenched. The rain pours down in a sheet and our only shelter is the thin tunnel of arching branches overhead. The wind keens and hurls scoops of soapy foam against the banks on either side of the dissolving river path.
“We can’t stay here.” If we can make it over the footbridge we’ll reach the turnoff onto the street. It’ll be easier to find shelter there until the storm passes.
“I don’t want to go.” Her voice seems to belong to someone else. I barely recognize it.
“Come on! It’s pouring out here.” I haul her toward the metal footbridge. We’re both shivering, blinded by the water.
“I said I don’t wanna, Soff! You can’t make me…”
The air snatches away her words. The noise has become deafening, great crashes of thunder that rattle my teeth. Kira screeches and pushes at me, trying to loosen my grip, clawing at my wrist. I grab for the sleeve of her jacket, but she’s left it unzipped, and it tears away from her, her arm swinging free. I latch onto her wrist.
“Please,” I shout to her. “This way.”
“Let go, Soff!” Her eyes glint with a look close to hatred. Her wrist slips out of my hands. She’s five steps away from me, ten. The fury is gone and there’s a strange, sleepy smile on her face. The white flares of lightning make a halo of her hair.
“Kira! Come back!”
And she tries to take a step. Toward me, toward the bridge, toward safety. Then her ankle goes sideways on the riverbank, made slick by the rain.
Frozen, I watch her fall. Her knee digs into the bank, leaving an imprint the shape of a doll’s head. Her hands rake deep channels into the earth, but it crumbles around her. The current yanks off one boot and sucks at her ankles. She doesn’t scream. Her lips are bloodless, the whites of her eyes shining like crescent moons.
I lunge for her but she slips from the bank completely.