At first I think Kira will be okay.
The emergency service people pack towels around me, under me. They wrap a foil blanket around my shoulders. My teeth are chattering but I don’t feel the cold.
Kira regains consciousness in the ambulance where the smell of the river is everywhere, earthy and vegetable. Mom is there too, telling her, “you’ll be fine, I know it, you’re fine, baby girl, please,” over and over again. I don’t know how we got here. I don’t remember much beyond screaming for help but it doesn’t seem to matter. Mom and I are both so happy to see Kira’s eyes open that we’re hugging each other. We’re crying in each other’s arms, hanging on for dear life.
When the paramedics rush Kira into the hospital she’s still awake, talking even. But her body looks so skinny on the gurney. A clutch of wet hair is slung across her forehead. No one will let me touch her.
“What’s that?” she whispers in a hoarse voice as they wheel her away from me.
“What, Kiki?” I ask.
“On my stomach?”
“What?”
“It’s my hand!” She stares at it like it isn’t a part of her.
Hours later, I learn she’s dead.
I’m huddled in the waiting room with Mom and Aunt Irene next to a coffee machine that doesn’t work properly and a vending machine that does. Aunt Irene was here when we arrived. She’d been working in her lab at the Centre when she got Mom’s call. I can’t look at either of them. I’m covered in crumbs. My breath smells of cheesy onion chips that have left a slick of scuzzy grease on my tongue. I can’t seem to stop eating them.
Her surgeon introduces himself by his first name. David. The same name as Dad though the two of them couldn’t look any more different. Dad sports a fluff of light hair he tries to use to mask his receding hairline but his face is young, his eyes bright and alert. This man is almost grandfatherly. His hands have great purplish veins that tremble when he flexes them.
“I’m so sorry,” he tells us. “We did everything we could.”
Cold lights, pale green floor. My ears swim as if the air pressure is shifting.
“There were complications. Hypoxemia, which triggered cardiac arrest.”
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do or say. My body feels nerveless. It sounds like he’s talking gibberish. There’s another man with him, taller with wiry glasses. He introduces himself as Dr. Lane Ballard, the director of the Centre. He’s polite on the surface but barely makes eye contact, even when he touches Aunt Irene’s arm like he knows her, which, I guess, he must.
“I’m so sorry for your family’s loss,” he’s saying, and I realize this is just the beginning. There will be more of this, an endless stream of strangers telling us how sorry they are and I hate him for it. He was supposed to help her.
Then I spot two police officers a pace or two behind him. There is something obscene about their appearance. Like they’ve all lined up to see us: a sideshow attraction.
“Irene, I tried to tell them we didn’t need to do this but they insisted,” says Dr. Ballard. The older of the two cops steps forward. His hair is closely shorn, like a monk’s, and now I’m supposed to explain to him what happened but I don’t know how to explain it.
“I was screaming for help. Someone heard me.” My lips are thick and rubbery, face bloated from crying. I tell him how there was a jogger downstream. He spotted Kira in the river and managed to fish her out.
“I’m not saying it’s your fault,” says the officer as if he’s talking to himself, as if Mom and Aunt Irene and his partner aren’t taking up space in this hallway too, “but we’re trying to understand how this happened.”
I can’t think of a response. He keeps his gaze trained on me until eventually his partner nudges him. “Don’t you read the news?” she says to him. “They do it sometimes. The kids who…you know. They say it’s an accident but…” He looks thoughtful as he places his notepad back in his pocket. “Come on,” she mutters. “There are others we have to get to.”
I feel so relieved when they turn away that I want to be sick.
After the officers are gone Dr. Varghese brings us into her office. She looks like she’s been crying too, which strikes me as strange at first. She only knew Kira for a few weeks. But when she hugs Mom it seems like more than just a doctor comforting a grieving parent. She cared about Kira.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, “Kira was special. Clever and funny. Everyone here adored her. She was…” Her words roll around me, water channelled around a dam. There are other things that she says but I don’t hear them. It’s only when she calls my eyes up to meet hers that I realize she’s speaking to me. “You should understand, Sophie—your mother and I have to make some difficult decisions right now.”
“What’s going to happen to my sister’s body?” I ask. Something is breaking apart inside of me. This is all my fault.
Dr. Varghese glances at Mom but she doesn’t say anything. I don’t even know if she’s heard any of the conversation. I take Mom’s hand and it’s moist, inert. Aunt Irene is silent.
“There are things we have to discuss because of your sister’s condition. I was saying that the government has decided that burial isn’t an option. Kira’s body will need to be examined by our pathologists. Then she’ll be cremated.”
“Cremated?” My voice is hoarse and the sound of it surprises me.
“It’s for the best, Sophie—”
“But I’ve been watching the news,” I break in, head swimming. “People with JI2—no one really knows what’s happening to them. Isn’t there a chance…”
“Your sister is dead,” Dr. Varghese says softly. “You need to understand that. We’ve observed the cessation of vital functions, her heartbeat and respiration. She’s gone.”
I feel panicky. My mouth keeps running. “But what does that mean now? Liam Barrett was moving. They said there was a burst of cellular activity. That his death might have been misdiagnosed or…”
“Sophie, she’s dead,” Mom whispers.
“But so was Liam Barrett!”
It makes me angry that she’s so tentative, that she isn’t asking these questions herself. That no one seems to be asking them.
Dr. Varghese’s tone is quiet, controlled. “The post-mortem anomalies are, as far as we can tell, meaningless. Your sister—she isn’t alive anymore.”
“As far as you know. I want to see her, I want to…” She was awake in the ambulance. She was talking to me.
“When the brain has been deprived of blood and oxygen, the cells begin to die. Until those cells die there may still be a burst of brain activity. Movement even—what they’re calling the Lazarus effect. But it doesn’t mean she’s alive. Your sister can’t talk to you. She can’t respond in any meaningful way. What we’re talking about is her body, not her.”
“Sophie,” Aunt Irene whispers. “There isn’t anything we can do for Kira now.”
Dr. Varghese’s voice is kind. “I know you don’t want to hear this, particularly with what’s on the news right now. But you need to know that in every way that matters Kira is gone.”
Kira is gone. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to focus on what she’s saying. Dr. Varghese is looking at Mom again. She’s staring out the window and her lips are moving ever so slightly but she’s still not making a sound.
“Cremation is mandatory. We don’t have a choice. I know this must seem terrible but until we understand JI2 better we need to take every precaution to minimize the risks of it spreading.”
Mom won’t agree to this. She won’t let go of Kira.
“We need to—”
“Sophie.” One word is all it takes. When Mom turns to Dr. Varghese I can tell something has cracked inside of her too. Her voice seems to come from very far away even though she’s still right next to me. “When will it happen?”
“I can’t say exactly. I’m sorry, I know this is difficult, but it’s important that her body be examined for anything that might help.”
“You can’t do this.” I hate the whine in my voice. It slices through any authority I have.
Mom’s eyes lock on mine and I can tell I’ve lost. She says wearily, “Sophie, I need you to wait for us outside. We need to get through this. We don’t have a choice. Your sister isn’t alive anymore. She’s…”
Her voice breaks and Aunt Irene gathers her up into her arms. She’s falling apart and I should be helping her. I need to be strong for her, for both of them. For Kira too—but all I feel is weak. Powerless. I have no choice but to do what she says.
I wander back toward the ER, unable to stand still. My body buzzes with useless adrenaline, broadcasting calamity. Moving helps. If I don’t move I might punch a hole through the concrete.
The hospital is a maze of bright lights and dim corridors. A knock-off underworld. I can see how tired the nurses are, how overstretched they must be, understaffed, wrung out. “Code green,” I hear over the announcement system. Minutes later a covered stretcher passes me in the hallway. I recognize it from my time at Toronto East General. They’re transporting a body. I can’t follow that thought, can’t hold it in my head. My grief is like a vast and smothering wave. Salt on my cheek, my tongue, my chin. No sound, too much sound, magnified in the hollow circles of my inner ear.
Then my phone is in my hand and I punch in Dad’s number. He should have been here. He’s the only person I can think of who might be able to help. So easily I’ve forgiven him those final days in Toronto, his strained smile as he told us he wasn’t coming with us to England. The way Kira twisted into me, hiding her face. Him, saying: “You have to understand how difficult it is for us. It’s complicated between your mom and me, there are complications and maybe time apart will help.”
Kira’s heart was hammering so hard I could feel the pulse of it in her neck. Mom had told us not to cry because he wouldn’t be able to talk to us if we were crying. Soon Kira had shoved her fist into her mouth so her teeth pressed into her skin. That was when I snapped at him: “Enough, okay? Enough, Dad! We get it.”
Something shifted in his face—guilt, maybe, breaking through the rehearsed words. I hope so. I hated him for betraying her—all three of us—so easily.
My finger hovers uncertainly over the screen, wishing desperately for the way things used to be. Remembering how it was before, when I was four and he used to read The Paper Bag Princess to me over and over again before bed while Mom tidied up after dinner. I had felt how much he loved me then, him squeaking the girl parts in a high-pitched falsetto, as Princess Elizabeth told Prince Ronald he looked like a bum. “The moral,” Dad would always tell me after, “is that sometimes the princess has to save herself. You remember that, Feef, okay?” Then he’d chuck me under my chin and kiss my nose.
Right now he exists in another universe, one where Kira hasn’t died. I could let him stay there, untouched by what has happened here, at least for a little longer. Do I really want to take away his happiness?
I miss him, I can’t help it. I need someone—anyone—to talk to. I dial his number.
“Hey, you can’t use that in here.”
Someone in a blue smock is waving at me, a volunteer, maybe a couple of years older than me. A distant, inaccessible part of me registers how good-looking he is. Muscular and dark, bronze-coloured hair. But his mouth is tight with frustration, as if I’m a child who is misbehaving.
“What’re you staring at, freakazoid?” I snap. A spasm of rage, like a muscle seizing up. I end the call before Dad can answer.
Instantly his eyes drop.
“Sorry,” I try to tell him, embarrassed, “my sister, she died…”
I turn away from him. My face is blood hot, my fists are clenched. The adrenaline and the anger drain away. I was too weak to save her. And now it’s too late.